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In India 

By 
G. W. Steevens 



Author of "The Land of the Dol- 
lar/' "Egypt in 1898/' "With 
^ Kitchener to Khartum," etc. 

t 



New York 

Dodd, Mead and Company 

1899 




m2i]m 



Copyright, 1899, 
By Dodd, Mead and Company. 






WH)^ 



Gf O.'-. 



BECOND COPY, 






CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

A VICEROY'S WELCOME. The Vestibule 
of India — An Epitome of Incongruity - i 

CHAPTER II 

BOMBAY. A City of Contrasts— From West 
to East — First Glimpse of the Native — The 
Parsis — A Beautiful Queen - - 6 

CHAPTER III 

LORD, HAVE MERCY ON US ! Nobody 
Cares — A Tenement House — A Segregation 

Camp — The Outlook - - - i6 

CHAPTER IV 

THE MOST SPORTING COUNTRY IN 
THE WORLD. H. H. the Maharajah— 
The State of Marwar — The Saving Horse - 25 

CHAPTER V 

A RAJPUT CITY. " Gentleman — Like 
Me " — Pure East — The Palace on the Rock 32 



vi Contents 

PACK 

CHAPTER VI 

THE CAMP OF EXERCISE. The Problem 
of the Defile — Patrols at Work — The Sham 
Fight — The British Army in Earnest — Points 
for Study — The Native Officer — Difficulties 
of the Question - - - - 40 

CHAPTER VII 

DELHI. The Kutb Minar — The Jumma 
Musjid — The Palace — Incongruous India - 56 

CHAPTER VIII 

CALCUTTA. "The Gentlemen at Fort 
William" — The Maidan — The Anglo-Indian : 
New Style — On the Hughli — The Bengali : 
His Legs - - - - - 64 

CHAPTER IX 

ON NATIVE SELF-GOVERNMENT. A 

Discreditable Record — The Calcutta Munic- 
ipal Bill— "The Rights of the People'*— 
Government's Blunder — The Bated Chair- 
man — Expenditure and Revenue — The Un- 
educated B.A. - - - "75 

CHAPTER X 

THE HIGHER EDUCATION. The Com- 
plete Babu — Cram — Superfluous B.A.'s — 
From "The National Magazine " — The Prac- 
tical Use of Learning - - - 90 



Contents vii 



CHAPTER XI 

THE MAHARAJAH BAHADUR. The 
Permanent Settlement — The Ganges and 
Behar — His Retinue — His Rich Relations — 
What do We Know? - - - lOO 

CHAPTER Xn 

DARJILING. The D. H. R.— The World of 
Plants — The Himalayas - - - no 

CHAPTER XHI 

THE VILLAGERS. Hungry and Helpless— 
The Bunnia — A Sugar-Mill — The Complaints 
— The Indian Evening - - - 119 

CHAPTER XIV 

THE CITY OF SHAH JEHAN. The Pearl 
Mosque — The Arabian Nights Alive — The 
Uncrowned Prisoner — Every Point Perfection 
— ^The Fit Close - - - " ^3^ 

CHAPTER XV 

THE RULERS OF INDIA. Parliament and 
India — The Legislative Council — The Mean- 
ing of Competitive Examinations - - 141 

CHAPTER XVI 

THE DISTRICT OFFICER. The Sad 
Case of Mukkan Singh — Points for Decision 
— Further Points — The Travelling Court- 
House — Omnipotent at Thirty - - 148 



viii Contents 



CHAPTER XVII 

JUSTICE. The Witnesses— A Conflict of 
Evidence — The Art of Perjury — Chutni and 
Meat - - _ - i^g 



CHAPTER XVIII 

PROVIDENCE AND THE PARLOUR 
GAME. Records — The Village Accountant 
— Reports — The Absent Presence - - 167 

CHAPTER XIX 

THE FOREST OFFICER. The Elephant 
— A Solitary Exile — The Plan and the Work 
— The Ranger - - " ^75 

CHAPTER XX 

THE CANAL. The Engineer— A Triumph 
of Engineering — Public Works That Pay — 
Glug-Glug - - - - 184 

CHAPTER XXI 

THE SHRINE OF THE SIKHS. Short Rule, 
Long Battles — Respectable India — A Miracle 
— ^Jewels and Dirt - - - - 192 

CHAPTER XXII 

ON THE BORDER. Peshawar City— Wax- 
cloth — The Last of His Family — The Dutiful 
Son - - - - - - 201 



Contents ix 

PAGE 

CHAPTER XXIII 

THE KHYBER. The Meeting Caravans— 
The Footprints of War — The Excitements of 
Sentry-Go — The Frontier Feeling - - 21 

CHAPTER XXIV 

THE MALAKAND. The Home of the 
Guides — A Box of Soldiers on a Rockery — 
Fort Chakdara — The Sons of Joseph - - 220 

CHAPTER XXV 

THE FRONTIER QUESTION. Bravery 
or Despair — The Afridis — Russia — Britain's 
Choice _____ 228 

CHAPTER XXVI 

OF RAJAHS. A Living Ghost— A Stagger- 
ing Compliment — The Resident Administra- 
tor — The Sporting Rajah _ _ _ 236 

CHAPTER XXVII 

THE COMPLETE GLOBE TROTTER. 
The Decline of the Hotel — The Indian Train 
— A Workmanlike Service — The Blessings of 
Friendship - - - - - 244 

CHAPTER XXVIII 

THE HAPPY HOMES OF INDIA. The 

Compound — Twenty-eight Servants Apiece — 
The Honour of the Servant — A Double 
Exile - - - - - 253 



Contents 



CHAPTER XXIX 



PAGE 



THE CASE OF REBELLIOUS POONA. 
The Empire of the Marathas — The Malcon- 
tent — A Religion Which is a Life — How the 
Native Dies ----- 262 

CHAPTER XXX 

THE JAIL. The Religion of Theft— Arcadia 
— At Jubilee Time — Opium on the Brain - 272 

CHAPTER XXXI 

HYDERABAD, DEKHAN. A Wealthy Ter- 
ritory- — Its Threshold — Golconda — A Wed- 
ding ----- 281 

CHAPTER XXXII 

MADRAS. A Spacious City— The East Coast 
Railway — The Southern Brahman — The Red- 
Rock of India - - _ - 290 

CHAPTER XXXIII 

THE SALT-PANS. Hard Work and Loneli- 
ness — A Brine-Watered Farm — An Honest 
Administration — Guarding the Guardians - 298 

CHAPTER XXXIV 

THE GREAT PAGODAS. Tanjore— The 
Sublime and the Ridiculous — Madura - - 306 



Contents xi 

PAGE 

CHAPTER XXXV 

THE RUPEE. Foreign Trade and Foreign 
Debt — The Fall in Silver — Salaries in India — 
The Export Trade — The Closing of the 
Mints — The Committee's Plan - - 3^3 

CHAPTER XXXVI 

THE ARMY AND MUTINY. The New 
Conditions — Split Regiments — Trust the Na- 
tive !— Imperial Service Troops - - 326 

CHAPTER XXXVII 

THE IMPERIAL BABU. The Decline of 
British Influence — Absence and Red-Tape — 
The " Europe-Returned " - - - 335 

CHAPTER XXXVIII 

THE LAND OF IRONIES. British Un- 
selfishness — The Farce or Justice — The 
Curse of Peace — The Barrier of Race - 343 



IN INDIA 



A VICEROY'S WELCOME 

The thud of three guns, dull in the lazy air, told 
the passengers of the P. and O. Company's "Arabia" 
that they were at the door of India. 

From the steamer the sights of the shore were 
muffled, like its sounds, in the breathless haze that 
expects the sun. We lay on still, colourless water 
in a channel. To port were shadows of ships, and 
presently, behind them, a thicker bank of grey where- 
from white faces of ghostly buildings shone without 
lustre. But to starboard the mainland of India raised 
itself on its elbow against a horizon that every minute 
grew rosier. Broad belts of black and pink fired 
and fused into liquid carmine ; the elbows turned 
from grey to black, and the water began to stir 
and laugh over a mile of shining dimples. India 
was awake. 

A glance back from the launch showed the " Arabia " 
at the very moment of awakening. Along the dark 

I 



A Viceroy's Welcome 

hull three tiers of sleepy yellow port-holes blinked at 
the shadowed water ; above, every point and spar and 
rope were picked out in the intensest black against the 
crimson sky. The flags, with which she was dressed 
from prow to rail, hung solemnly motionless. Hugely 
graceful, the union of power and fineness, revealing 
unsuspected curves and angles, she had kept the. ful- 
ness of her beauties, coquettishly, until the moment of 
good-bye. 

The other ships, as we stole past them, turned in 
like manner from film to the clearest silhouette — the 
heavy-hulled trooper, the low turret-guardship with 
awnings from stem to stern like turtle-decks, the 
slim cruiser, and the slips of torpedo-boats. Higher 
up lay black and red cargo-boats ; lower down, white- 
winged yachts. On the nearing shore the dim shapes 
of buildings cleared, separated, and combined into a 
tall, white-limbed city, warming and blushing like a 
bride. The launch stopped at a pier beneath a white 
and amber pavilion. Then suddenly the sun shot up 
behind the mainland ; welcoming reflections sprang 
everywhere to meet him ; the world pulsed with 
colour. And I was standing in India. 

It was good luck for the prying stranger to land at 
Bombay off^ the same boat as a new Viceroy. The 
splendours which otherwise must have been sought 
out with diligence and found in detail came there to 
meet the landing and combined themselves. The 
vestibule of India was swept and garnished. The 



A Viceroy's Welcome 

pavilion that ushered us in was spread partly on 
Venetian masts, partly on living trees ; but their trunks 
were wrapped round with white and amber also, lest 
anything dirty should smirch the new Viceroy's gaze. 
Down the middle ran a broad aisle; on each side of 
it a battalion of chairs ; at the top, above the water, 
was a clear space for the most notable people, and a 
triumphal arch in the shape of a tower. A hedge of 
shrubs round the whole lent it the air of a flower- 
show. Outside these again was a hedge of native po- 
lice — little, sturdy, brown men in navy blue, with 
bare legs, and sandals, and bright yellow caps. At the 
entrance on the inland side were British military police 
in white, regulating the traffic. 

I looked down the broad avenue that led into Bom- 
bay — a vista of white, shining palaces set in green, 
tier and gable and turret climbing skywards out of 
massed trees. But before there was time to do more 
than look, a couple of companies of British infantry, 
cool to the eye in their white uniforms, marched up, 
stiffened into line, and grounded arms with a rattle 
along one side of the pavilion. Directly on that ar- 
rived the rulers of Bombay. 

They made a strange blending of splendour and 
shabbiness. Clear-skinned men and bright-eyed 
women drove up in victorias that showed more dust 
than paint ; a servant in gorgeous livery was on the 
box, and the stuffing was coming out of the horse's 
collar. The white men and women wore white, as 

3 



A Viceroy's Welcome 

befitted the freshness of the golden morning ; even 
generals and colonels showed no other colour than 
the ribbons on their breasts. The dark blue and 
gold of naval uniforms and court dress, the epaulettes 
of the very consuls, looked dull in the shimmer of 
the sun. But the rich natives paid for all. They 
shone in the gathering crowd like rainbows. There 
were women in purple and yellow-green draperies, 
servants in flaming scarlet, masters ablaze with bul- 
lion and jewels. Nothing was too resplendent for 
their modesty or too incongruous for their taste. A 
black gown like a clergyman's, a spectacled face 
under a black oilcloth cap — its shape like two hats, 
one balanced upside down on top of the other — only 
threw up the neighbouring butterfly in a peaked 
turban of vermilion and gold, a ring in his ear with 
a bloated bunch of pearls and emeralds, strings of 
pearls round his neck, and a gold-embroidered muslin 
blouse which died away — alas ! — below the waist into 
shrunken pyjamas, no socks, and broken elastic-sided 
boots, with frayed tabs flapping moodily behind him. 
Beside this vision of radiance you could hardly see 
the pufF-cheeked, moist-eyed gentleman in a frock- 
coat and a deerstalker; and the eagle-nosed yellow 
youth in reach-me-down blue-striped flannels was 
barely saved from extinction by the green and crim- 
son embroidery on his purple velvet smoking-cap. 
Every race, every creed, every colour, every style — 
the rajah with his diamonds and the thin-legged 

4 



A Viceroy's Welcome 

sweeper outside in the street — they grouped them- 
selves to present on the threshold of India a living 
epitome of the hundred-headed incongruities that 
swarm within. 

Boom ! came the first gun from the white warship, 
the first of thirty-one. A launch flickered across the 
dazzling water. Along the parapet glided a funnel 
and the point of a flagstaff. The uniforms and court 
suits and academic gowns clustered at the head of the 
steps. They stood for a minute, two, three, in the 
bunched but shifting group that means greeting and 
introduction, then broke. " God Save the Queen ! " 
crashed the band ; all stood uncovered j and the new 
Viceroy stepped serenely into his government. A 
slow procession along the aisle ; a pause and a silence 
which hinted that the Corporation of Bombay was 
delivering an address ; a few clear-cut sentences of 
reply ; clapping ; a grey hat bowing from a carriage ; 
the scrunch of wheels ; red-and-white lance-pennons 
whirling into column — and the first glimpse of India 
shifts and breaks like a kaleidoscope and leaves its 
first city naked to curiosity. 



II 

BOMBAY 

The first sight of India is amazing, entrancing, 
stupefying. Of other countries you become aware 
gradually : Italy leads up to the Levant, and Egypt 
passes you on insensibly to the desert. Landed in 
Bombay, you have strayed into a most elaborate dream, 
infinite in variety, spinning with complexity, a gallery 
of strange faces, a buzz of strange voices, a rainbow 
of strange colours, a garden of strange growths, a book 
of strange questions, a pantheon of strange gods. 
Different beasts and birds in the street, different 
clothes to wear, different meal-times, and different 
food — the very commonest things are altered. You 
begin a new life in a new world. 

It takes time to come to yourself. At first every- 
thing is so noticeable that you notice nothing. You 
pin your eyes to the little fawn-coloured, satin- 
skinned, humped oxen in the carts, to the blue crows 
that dance and spar in the gutters. They are the 
very commonest things in India, but just because 
they are common bullocks — yet with humps ! — com- 
mon crows — yet blue ! — ^their fascination is enthrall- 
ing. The white ducks you wear all day are like a 

6 



Bombay 

girl's first court dress, and you sit down to breakfast 
at eleven off a fish called pomphlet with the sensa- 
tions of a Gulliver. 

When things begin to come sorted and sifted, 
Bombay reveals itself as a city of monstrous con- 
trasts. Along the sea-front one splendid public 
building follows another — variegated stone facades 
with arch and colonnade, cupola and pinnacle and 
statuary. At their feet huddle flimsy huts of mat- 
ting, thatched with leaves, which a day's rain would 
reduce to mud and pulp. You sit in a marble-paved 
club, vast and airy as a Roman atrium, and look out 
over gardens of heavy red and violet flowers towards 
choking alleys where half-naked idolaters herd by- 
families together in open-fronted rooms, and filth 
runs down gullies to fester in the sunken street. In 
this quarter you may see the weaver twirling his 
green and amber wool on a hand-loom — a skeleton 
so simple and fragile that a kick would make sticks of 
it J go to the street corner, and you see black smoke 
belch from a hundred roaring mills, whose competi- 
tion cuts the throat of all the world. In the large 
open spaces Parsis bowl each other under-hand full- 
pitches and cry, " Tank you, tank you," after the 
ball ; by the rail squats a Hindu, who would like, if 
only the law would let him, to marry babies and burn 
widows. 

Yet, for all its incongruities, Bombay never will 
have you forget that it is a great city. If it had 

7 



Bombay- 
no mills it would be renowned for its port ; if it 
had neither it would be famous for its beauty. Its 
physical configuration is something like that of New 
York. Bombay lies at the southern end of a long 
narrow island; its oldest part, the Fort, is toward 
the southernmost extremity. Here are the landing- 
piers, the public buildings, the newspapers, the prin- 
cipal business centres. Next comes the native city ; 
and the fashionable quarter for residence once lay 
northward where the Byculla Club, the best in Bom- 
bay, still marks its site. But flowing business, as in 
New York, has risen and surged over the city ; it has 
washed the native quarter northward, and the Club 
now stands an almost solitary land-mark among cot- 
ton-mill chimneys and teeming native tenements. 
The Europeans, with the ever-multiplying class of 
rich natives, now live further westward on the Ridge 
or on Malabar Hill, which, turning south to face 
the old town, forms the western horn of Back Bay. 
From the narrowness of the original city, and the 
four-miles' drive between it and the Ridge, it follows 
that rents are high and land continually more valuable ; 
and from that follows that the native town is not one- 
or two-storeyed as elsewhere in India, but laid out in 
great tenement blocks, which lend themselves to 
picturesqueness and to plague. 

So that in the drive from the Apollo Bunder to 
Malabar Point, all India is unfolded in one panorama. 
First the business houses and the great buildings — 

8 



Bombay 

those the richest, these the stateliest in India, and 
challenging comparison with almost any city in the 
world. Every variation of design is theirs, but they 
find a link of uniformity in the red-brown colours 
common to most, and in the oriental profusion of 
ornament. First comes the Venetian Secretariat, 
then the Gothic University Library and the French 
University Hall ; between them the great Clock 
Tower, which peals forth hymn-tunes on Sunday, 
and on week-days " God Save the Queen ! " and 
" Home, Sweet Home." The white-pinnacled Law 
Courts follow in Early English, then the Post and 
Telegraph Offices in Miscellaneous Gothic. But the 
jewel of Bombay is the Victoria Railway Station, a 
vast domed mass of stone fretted with point and 
column and statuary. Between them all you catch 
vistas of green mead and shrubbery, purple-belled 
creepers, scarlet-starred shrubs. The whole has its 
feet in bowers of succulent green and its elbows on 
shining-leaved banyan-trees. A proud and comely 
city, you say, the Briton feels himself a greater man 
for his first sight of Bombay. 

Then suddenly the magician turns his ring and new 
has become old, plain is coloured, solid is tumbled 
down, the West has been swallowed up utterly by 
the East. Cross but one street and you are plunged 
in the native town. In your nostrils is the smell of 
the East, dear and never to be forgotten : rapturously 
you snuff that blending of incense and spices and 

9 



Bombay 

garlic, and sugar and goats and dung. The jutting 
houses close in over you. The decoration of Bombay 
henceforth is its people. The windows are frames for 
women, the streets become wedges of men. Under 
the quaint wooden sun-hoods that push out over the 
serried windows of the lodging-houses, along the 
rickety paintless balconies and verandahs, all over the 
tottering roofs — only the shabbiness of the dust and 
dirty plaster relieves the gorgeousness of one of the 
most astounding collections of human animals in the 
world. Forty languages, it is said, are habitually 
spoken in its bazaars. That, to him who understands 
no word of any of them, is more curious than inter- 
esting. But then every race has its own costume j so 
that the streets of Bombay are a tulip-garden of 
vermilion turbans and crimson, orange and flame 
colour, of men in blue and brown and emerald 
waistcoats, women in cherry-coloured satin drawers, 
or mantles, drawn from the head across the bosom 
to the hip, of blazing purple or green that shines like 
a grasshopper. You must go to India to see such 
dyes. They are the very children of the sun, and 
seem to shine with an unreflected radiance of their 
own. If you check your eye and ask your mind for 
the master-colour in the crowd, it is white — white 
bordered with brown or fawn or amber legs. But 
when you forget that and let the eye go again, the 
scarlets and yellows and shining greens — each hue 
alive and quivering passionately like the tropical sun 

10 



Bombay 

at midday — fill and dazzle it anew : in the gilding 
light the very arms and legs show like bronze or 
amber or the bloom on ripe damsons. You are walk- 
ing in a flaring sunset, and come out of it blinking. 

Look under the turbans. At first all natives look 
alike, but soon you begin to mark distinctions of dress 
and even of type. The first you will pick out is the 
Arab horse-dealer. His long robe and hood, bound 
round with cords and tufts of camel's hair, mark him 
off from the wisp-clothed native of India. The Arab 
gives you the others in focus. He is not much 
accounted by those who know him ; yet, compared 
with the Indian, his mien is high, his movements free 
and dignified, his features strongly cut and resolute. 
The Bagdad Jew is hardly a type of lofty manhood, 
but under his figured turban and full-tasselled fez his 
face looks gravely wise. The blue-bloused Afghan is 
a savage frankly, but a strong man also. By the side 
of any one of them the down-country native of Bom- 
bay is poor and weak and insignificant. He looks as 
if you could break him across your knee. His form- 
less features express nothing ; his eyes have the shin- 
ing meekness, but not the benevolence, of the cow's ; 
he moves slowly and without snap, like a sick man. 
He seldom speaks, and when he does his voice is 
small. Sometimes he smiles faintly — laughs never. 

To the nervelessness of the Bombay natives one 
race furnishes an exception — the Parsi. The Parsi, 
as his name tells you, comes from Persia, whence he 

II 



Bombay 

was persecuted for worshipping fire. Persecuted races 
develop their own virtues and their own aptitudes ; 
and now, under the British peace, the Parsi flourishes 
exceedingly. He is the Jew of the East — leaves other 
people to make things while he makes money. Bank- 
ing, agency, commission, brokerage, middleman's 
profits are the Parsi's Golconda. He has perceived 
the advantages wherewith a European education 
equips him for these pursuits, and has sedulously 
educated himself into the most European of all 
Asiatics. He walks out with his wife — a refined- 
looking creature in a pale pink or lemon-yellow 
gown, with a pea-green, crimson-edged shawl passed 
^ over her head — to hear the band at sunset, and talks 
^o her as a man might talk to his friend. He takes a 
holiday at Darjiling in the starving frost, and professes 
himself much braced by it. And when the young 
Parsi speaks of " going home," he means not Persia 
— where he would not be received with enthusiasm — 
but. England. 

You can see the change in the dress of two genera- 
tions. The elderly Parsi wears his shirt outside his 
cerise trousers, and on his head a weird plum-colour 
structure, like a Siamese -twin of a hat that you can 
put on either way up. The young Parsi wears, as a 
rule, a short frock-coat buttoned over white duck 
trousers, and on his head a linoleum helmet, some- 
thing between a Prussian grenadier's and a fly-paper 
man's. He is shocked at our denial of representa- 

12 



# 



Bombay 

tlve institutions to India, conceiving that if they were 
granted he would be a representative, and forgetting 
that, we once gone, the Mussulmans would straight- 
way push him into the sea and take his rupees unto 
themselves. 

For the Parsi's rupees are very many. Sir 
Jamshidji Jijibhoy, the richest, is worth about five 
millions sterling. Many others hasten in his foot- 
steps. So greenly flourish the Parsis that they have 
nearly filled up all the eligible sites on the Ridge, the 
best part of Bombay, and soon there will be no place 
for the Briton. While the rich Parsi lives in an airy 
bungalow, English ladies have to hire land and live 
thereon in tents. 

Bombay is the extremest case of a commonplace 
but irritating evil which is felt in Calcutta also, and 
will in time be felt, unless it be provided against, in 
all the great Indian cities. The British residents, 
supposed to be lords of the city, have no place to 
live in. Our rule has enriched the natives till they 
outbid us for the luxuries and even the necessities of 
life. The pinch has come first in Bombay, partly be- 
cause the Parsis have been quicker and abler than 
other races in taking advantage of the peace and in- 
dustrial facilities we have afforded, partly because the 
city, lying on a narrow island, can only extend in one 
direction. Nobody grudges the Parsi the fruits of his 
level-headed enterprise. But he is not always a 
pleasant neighbour to the fastidious eyes and ears and 

13 



Bombay 

nose of the European — though, indeed, things have 
now gone so far that the European would put up with 
that in return for a possible bungalow, and cannot get 
it. The best part of Bombay is the Ridge and Mala- 
bar Hill, and here house after house is passing into 
native occupancy. The result is that young and 
slenderly paid Europeans — and even many married 
men — have literally nowhere to live. The chambers 
in the clubs are all full, and so, in the season, are the 
comfortless hotels. At an exorbitant rate they hire 
land to pitch tents on ; and even from this they may 
be driven at the will of the native owner. The 
remedy for this state of things is to mark off reserva- 
tions in all large cities to be occupied by Europeans 
alone. It should be done at once, for every year 
makes it more difficult and expensive. 

It must be said that if the Parsi knows how to get, 
he knows also how to give. Every Parsi educational 
institution or charity, for men or women, is endowed 
beyond the dreams of London hospitals. One cotton- 
spinner is said to have given ;£"200,ooo to the Uni- 
versity of Bombay ; many others are hardly less 
munificent. To them, to the Bagdad-Jewish Sassons 
and — last, but after all essential to the prosperity of 
the others — to the British Government, Bombay owes 
the stately public buildings, the spacious open places 
that give her the grand air above almost every city of 
the West. 

For Bombay is indeed a queen among cities. Drive 

H 



Bombay 

down from the Ridge by the white, flooding moon- 
light, beneath fleshy green leaves as huge and flowers 
as languorously gorgeous as in any fairy tale, — be- 
neath hundred-fingered fronds of palm and wax- 
foliaged banyans that feel for earth with roots hang- 
ing from their branches; past tall, broad-shouldered 
architecture rising above these. Western in its design. 
Eastern in the profusion of its embellishment ; look- 
ing always out to the blue-veiled bay with the golden 
lights on its horns. Then think of the factory smoke, 
the numberless bales of cotton, the hives of coolies, 
the panting steamers in the harbour, the grim-eyed 
batteries, and the white warships. Bombay is a 
beautiful queen in silver armour and a girdle of gold. 



15 



Ill 

LORD, HAVE MERCY ON US ! 

" HERE-we-have-some-ve-ry-char-act-er-is-tic-and- 
typ-i-cal-tem-per-a-ture-charts,'* said the doctor. A 
Parsi speaks English with a staccato that accents 
every syllable alike. But fbr that you would hardly 
have distinguished the doctor, in his gold-rimmed 
spectacles, well-cut flannel suit, and grey pith helmet, 
from a swarthy European. The truth is that he has 
never been in Europe at all ; yet he is one of the best- 
known authorities on bubonic plague in the world. 

Down the long, light, and airy ward — plague and 
light and air cannot live together — was a double row 
of some thirty beds, covered with violet blankets. 
From under each protruded a dark, small, close- 
cropped head. Some lay quite still with eyes tight 
shut ; some stared up at the pointed roof with eyes 
moist and shining ; one boy grinned almost merrily. 
All were sick of the plague ; on statistics it was to 
be expected that three out of every four would die in 
the next few hours. 

At its first onset, two years ago, plague killed its 
two hundred and forty a-day ; now it has sunk to fifty 
a-day, but it goes on steadily. Bombay has resigned 

i6 



Lord, Have Mercy on Us! 

herself to another four or five years of it — which 
means, at the present rate, that one-tenth of her popu- 
lation will die of it between now and 1904. 

Then what is to be done ? asks the practical Eng- 
lishman. Ask the uneducated native, and he will say 
that the white Empress is angry because some black- 
guards defaced her statue two years ago ; now that it 
is restored again things may be expected to go better. 
Ask the educated native, and he will placidly reply, 
" Nothing." Let it spend itself, let it become 
endemic, says he, finding much consolation in the 
Greek word. Human life has always been abundant 
and cheap in India. Here is the spectacle of a great 
city where one disease has killed its thousands in two 
years, and is killing its hundreds now every week ; 
and nobody cares. White man and brown alike ac- 
cept it as a new circumstance of their existence, and 
that is all. 

Yet not quite all, nor is it quite just to say that 
nobody cares. It seemed that at present all that can 
be done, short of pulling down Bombay, was being 
done, and — it seemed for the moment — not wholly in 
vain. The municipality had partly recovered from 
the paralysis which overtook it at the enemy's first 
attack ; it had come back to Bombay again, even the 
most enlightened native no longer feeling his life in 
danger. The military visitations had ceased. They 
frightened the natives. In one case, I was told, when 
a couple of naval officers, with bluejackets and native 

17 



Lord, Have Mercy on Us ! 

infantry, arrived to inspect a large tenement house, 
they found that every one of the three hundred ten- 
ants had bolted in the night- — leaving only two men to 
die alone of plague — and had spread themselves to 
sow contagion all over the quarter. Now the munic- 
ipality does what is to be done, especially the few 
British members of it. 

I had the luck to fall in with men who could 
show me the whole process, from cause to cure — or 
death. The cause was simple enough : two minutes 
in the native quarter, and you saw and smelt and 
tasted it. The cause is sheer piggery, dirt and dark- 
ness, foul air and rabbit-warren overcrowding. The 
huge houses, with their ranks of windows, their worn 
plaster and scratched, rickety shutters, have slum 
written all over them in a universal language; but for 
wooden hoods projecting like gargoyles to shade some 
of the windows, they might be in Edinburgh or 
Naples. 

But walk in, and what you see surpasses everything 
European. On stamped earth floors, between bare 
walls, by the dimness of one tiny window, you see 
shapes squatting like monkeys. They stir, lithe but 
always languid, and presently you see that they are 
human. Babies, naked children, young women and 
youths, mothers and fathers, shrivelled grandsires and 
grand-dams — whole families stifle together in the 
thick darkness, breed, and take in lodgers. In the 
room, where there is hardly space to move, they sleep 

i8 



Lord, Have Mercy on Us! 

and work at trades, and cook their food with pungent 
cakes of cow-dung. Because January is cold to 
their bare limbs, they shut doors and windows, to fug 
and fester worse. The lower rooms are worn down 
beneath the level of the street and of the drains ; the 
upper are holes beneath the sloping roof, where a man 
cannot stand upright. On the storeys between these 
are dens lighted only from the dark corridor. You 
look into them, and at first see no more than a feeble 
wick fluttering in a night-glass ; then moist eyes shine 
at you out of the darkness, and again two, four, six, 
ten men and women are sitting motionless against the 
wall. They neither speak nor stir — just sit and ripen 
for pestilence. 

On the door-jamb of this house are a dozen red 
marks — dates with a line round them, in some semi- 
circular, in others a complete circle. Each means a 
case of plague — the full circles a death, the halves a 
removal to hospital. For your own part you wonder 
that anybody in the poisonous lair is left alive. 

Improvement is coming — tardy and partial, still an 
improvement on the worst. At this house we fell in 
with an English gentleman, a man of business and a 
member of the municipality, who was devoting his 
money and time and life to saving these wretches. 
Equipped with large powers of compulsion, he was 
forcing the landlord to pierce shafts through the whole 
height of the house, to replace small windows by big, 
to do away with the garrets. The landlord, a Hindu, 

19 



Lord, Have Mercy on Us ! 

had all the native's terror of spending a farthing : he 
had argued and pleaded and dallied, but this morning 
he was at last beginning. We came across him — a 
fat, yellow toad in spotless white turban, shirt, and 
drawers, with a red kummerbund — half-sulky, half- 
fawning, trembling to the naked eye. For most of 
his roorns he will be getting two rupees (2s. 8d.) 
a-week. A native docker's pay is only seven ; but a 
native can easily live on two rupees a-week, and 
afford the rent out of the five. There are perhaps 
fifty rooms in the house, so that it is not wonderful 
that the yellow toad grows fat. 

The English councillor had persuaded some of the 
worst-lodged to run up shelters of bamboo and mat- 
ting and live in the yard outside. It was light and 
airy at least, though foul, whereas the rooms indoors 
were mostly clean. Here, little isles of brown skin 
and scarlet, white and yellow cotton, sat families amid 
the carts and humped oxen, the goats and the fowls. 
In thie house the goat and kid lived upstairs with the 
people ; at one door a cooped duck was quacking 
mournfully. In the yard the oxen lived in the open, 
for the councillor had converted the byre with bamboo 
and limewash into an emergency hospital. 

Going out — it was good to open your mouth and 
nostrils again — we passed blocks of the new buildings 
the municipality has provided, — hideous, like all works 
of corporations, but solidly built of stone and brick, 
with at least a chance of seeing and breathing. We 

20 



Lord, Have Mercy on Us! 

came next to a segregation camp, where they isolate 
and watch people who have been in contact or under 
suspicion of contact with the plague-stricken. It was 
a little village of white bamboo-matting, with an open 
compartment in a big shed for each family. As it 
was already eight o'clock, most of the inhabitants 
were out; here and there sat a nose-ringed woman 
among the few brass cooking-pans which made up 
the family furniture. The inmates of these camps 
may go to work, but they must be back by six; 
meanwhile, the spectacled, unshaven native apothe- 
cary in charge strolls up and down chambers as 
soundless as if they were already graves. 

For the climax of the dismal story we come to the 
hospital and the Parsi physician — one native, at least, 
who knows his duty and does it. As he walked from 
bed to bed there stepped in from the sun-steeped 
garden a golden-haired English girl in a white-and- 
red uniform — a nurse who had volunteered to come 
out for plague duty, and has lived with death for two 
years. As they passed, one skeleton raised brilliant 
eyes and cried out thickly. " It-is-the-ty-pi-cal-voice- 
of-plague-as-in-in-tox-i-ca-tion," remarked the doctor. 
The next was a boy with facial bubo — a hideous en- 
'largement of one cheek and jaw to double the size of 
the other. The next lay and panted ; the next — his 
wrists tied firmly to the bed — muttered and struggled 
m delirium. The next was recovering, but had lost 
his reason. On the breast of the last of the row was 

21 



Lord, Have Mercy on Us ! 

a great stain of treacly gangrene with a yellow border 
round it. 

Outside there was a clash of cymbals, and raucous 
voices seemed to be singing a round. A dozen men 
strode briskly up the street carrying a bier and a 
shape under a pall strewn with flowers. 

NOTE. 

The foregoing description was written in the first week of 
January 1899. In the first week of March I was again in Bom- 
bay and found a very different state of things. Plague had in- 
creased fearfully, and the natives were once more in full flight. In 
the first week of February the deaths that admittedly resulted from 
plague were five hundred and eighty-eight. The next week they 
rose to a hundred a-day. By the end of the third week in Febru- 
ary they were over one hundred and twenty a-day ; and in the first 
week of March it was admitted that over one hundred and fifty 
cases were dying daily of plague, while every unofficial person you 
met insisted that the official estimates were designedly optimistic, 
and put the daily mortality between two hundred and fifty and 
three hundred. Thousands of natives fled daily ; and though, to 
"my eye, the city seemed as full as ever, I was assured by residents 
who knew it well that I was mistaken. In addition to this, 
plague was reappearing at Poona, was very severe at Bangalore, 
while on the Kolar gold-fields, in Hyderabad territory, at least one 
European had been infected, and the flight of the coolies had 
thrown all work into disorder. About the same time plague made 
its reappearance in Calcutta ; it was asserted — of course unoffi- 
cially — that several Europeans died of it. With the advent of the 
hot weather, which in these parts of the country begins at mid- 
March, plague has hitherto always declined. 

It is difficult to be certain of statistics in a country like India, 
where a constitutionally nervous government withholds all the in- 
formation it can; but even the few figures quoted disclose a situa- 

22 



Lord, Have Mercy on Us ! 

tion which in Great Britain would be thought appalling. In India 
nobody cares. Yet it is easy to see that if plague is to recur every 
cold weather in Bombay with added severity — and there is ap- 
parently no scientific certainty in the pious hope that it will ex- 
haust itself in seven years or so — the only possible end will be ruin 
to the city. Suppose an average mortality of one hundred a-day 
spread over one hundred days in the early part of the year. Even 
this moderate estimate comes to ten thousand a-year, and for one 
that dies you may assume that at least ten bolt till hot weather re- 
turns. In a year or two business will be paralysed by quarantme 
and segregation and by the lack of labour, and Bombay, at the 
present rate, will sooner or later cease to exist as a great city. 

Of course this is not to be taken as a prophecy. The one certain 
thing about plague — and it is the only excuse for the apathy of the 
Indian Government in presence of it — is that nobody knows any- 
thing certain about it. Conferences and commissions dot the 
country, and medical Lieutenant- Colonels give evidence before 
them ; but nothing coherent emerges from the mass of detail and 
opinion. Nobody seems quite certain whether inoculation will 
keep off, much less cure, the disease. Nobody would be surprised 
if it were to become endemic in India — a second cholera, only far 
worse ; on the other hand, nobody would be surprised if it disap- 
peared as suddenly as it came. 

In this uncertainty most of the provincial governments prefer to 
sit still and hope, rather than irritate native opinion by taking 
strong measures of local segregation. Most Europeans in high 
office applaud this policy ; most others despise it. Some say that 
it would have paid better to burn Bombay to the ground as soon as 
plague broke out ; others, more moderate, deplore the abandon- 
ment, in deference to native prejudice, of the strict measures of 
visitation and segregation which were at first enforced in Bombay. 
There are three methods of dealing with plague. The first is that 
attributed — let us hope mistakenly — to the Lieutenant-Governor of 
Bengal. Being pressed by the Viceroy, who was in turn pressed 
by the Home Government, to take strong measures to enforce sani- 
tation, observation of suspects, and segregation, in Calcutta, the 

23 



Lord, Have Mercy on Us! 

Lieutenant-Governor — so the tale goes — refused, and threatened to 
resign if he were pressed further. The only possible reason for 
such a refusal would be sheer cowardice — the fear of an agitation 
in the native press and possible riots in the native quarters; its 
only possible result would be contempt of government among the 
governed, and, sooner or later, thousands dead of plague. The 
second method was pursued with great success in a large village in 
the Punjab. Plague had broken out, and the infected persons 
were to be taken away. The civil servant and police-officer went 
into the village to fetch them, whereon the inhabitants collected on 
the roofs and pelted them with tiles. As long as only the white 
men were hit, this was very entertaining sport ; only by bad luck 
a few ill-aimed tiles fell among the Pathan policemen who were 
following. These at once opened fire and killed eight of the vil- 
lagers. The infected persons were then peacefully taken away, 
the village isolated, and the attack of plague nipped in the bud. 
The third method, employed with great success at Poona by (I 
think) Colonel Creagh, V.C., is a combination of the other two. 
He employed soldiers to visit suspected houses, and Brahmans to go 
with them to explain the necessity of the measures taken. This is 
probably the best method of the three. The fatalistic attitude 
hitherto adopted by the provincial governments — with the meri- 
torious exception of Madras — seems explicable only as a con- 
venient means for keeping down the overgrowth of Indian popula- 
tions. 



24 



IV 

THE MOST SPORTING COUNTRY IN 
THE WORLD 

In the ignorant West we think of India as a land 
of giant palms shooting from matted undergrowth of 
languorous scents and steaming heat. The India you 
run through between Bombay and Jodhpur is mere 
prairie — coarse grass, scanty trees here and there, thin 
goats and cattle, sand, and shivering villagers. As 
for steaming heat — w-w-w-wr ! — bloodless fingers 
trembled helplessly round buttons as I tried to dress 
in the railway carriage. Tropical India ! W-w-w- 
w-wr ! 

The kindness of the superintendent of the railway 
had postponed the agony from three till seven in the 
morning by uncoupling my carriage at Jodhpur. I 
blessed his name, and the easy, unbuttoned habits of 
native States, as I stepped out on to the empty, spot- 
less platform and found the sun just rising. Half-a- 
dozen bare-legged natives cowered under the well- 
built offices — shaking violently, shrunken, miserable, 
half-dead, waiting for the sun to kindle them back to 
life. For luckier me came a carriage with three foot- 
men, and a cart drawn by a couple of towering camels 
— their noses thrust heavenwards in vain, indignant 

25 



The Most Sporting Country in the World 

protest — to take the baggage. We rolled forth into 
the independent Rajput State of Jodhpur. 

Its inhabitants seemed different from the flabby 
creatures I had left in Bombay. They were taller, 
held themselves straight, and looked before them ; 
most grew strong, black, bushy beards, self-respect- 
ingly oiled, parted in the middle, and brushed stiffly 
upward and towards the ears. Many of them were 
on horseback, sitting upright, with a firm and easy 
seat, controlling spirited ponies with a touch on a 
single snaffle. There seemed, indeed, an extraordi- 
nary number of horses out that morning about Jodh- 
pur. Sandy rides bordered the well-metalled road on 
both sides, and almost a continuous string of horses 
stood tied up to the regularly planted trees. As I 
reached my host's gate, a man holding a chestnut 
Arab stood up on the wall and salaamed. 

An hour later I was privileged to meet the Prime 
Minister. He wore a pith topi — which means sun- 
helmet — a padded and quilted box-coat, and beneath 
it strange breeches of drab cloth, of which the con- 
tinuations came down, without gaiters, over his boots. 
His conversation was of pig-sticking and the mouth- 
ing of young horses. Presently, riding out, we came 
to the cupolas of the Maharajah's suburban palace. 
A dozen saddle-horses stood outside it, and a string of 
sheeted thoroughbreds was being taken out to ex- 
ercise. The living part of the palace is neither large 
nor luxurious as maharajahs' dwellings go j but the 

26 



The Most Sporting Country in the World 

stables are vast beyond the dreams of Tattersall. 
Every more than usually palatial building in the en- 
virons of Jodhpur turns out to be a stable. The 
palace establishment is a great quadrangle of loose 
boxes about the size of Russell Square. Saddles and 
sets of carriage harness, new and old, frayed and 
glorious, Wilkinson and Ram Singh, line the walls in 
battalions. His Highness was unhappily not out this 
morning ; a week before, schooling a two-year-old on 
the racecourse, he had been carried into a post and 
had hurt his arm. It was still in a sling, and the 
Maharajah — a handsome but languid lad of eighteen 
or so — was deeply depressed. " I am feeling a bit 
chippy this morning," he explained: carriage exercise 
was no use to him ; he wanted to be on horseback or 
with his dogs and gun. 

We trotted on with the Prime Minister for the 
further inspection of Jodhpur. Beyond the palace — 
his Excellency larking over a couple of fences on the 
way — we came to a spacious polo-ground laid down 
with faultlessly rolled grit : to this is attributed the 
fact that they had never had anybody killed at this 
game. Past the polo-ground was a racecourse ; on it 
more horses were being exercised ; and when you 
raised your eyes to the sandy horizon, behold ! it was 
thick with horses on every side — young horses and 
old, Walers and Arabs and country-breds, racers and 
pig-stickers and polo-ponies, hackneys and even a pair 
of Shetlands, greys, chestnuts, and blacks, — the whole 

27 



-Mk. 



The Most Sporting Country in the World 

country was a whirl of horses wherever the eye could 
see and as far as the eye could reach. 

The Jodhpur riding-breeches — breeches and gaiters 
all in one piece, as full as you like above the knee, 
fitting tight below it, without a single button or strap 
— have been taken up, as I am told, by a London 
artist, and are on the way to be world-famous. The 
Jodhpur standing martingale is as yet less known : it 
is thought that leather chafes a horse in the hot 
weather, so a long band of soft cloth is used instead. 
The State polo team has beaten most in India, and no 
cavalry regiment thinks itself quite ready for a big 
tournament till it has put in a fortnight's practice at 
Jodhpur. It is many years now since the Jodhpur- 
owned Selwood, the Prime Minister up — " I riding 
niny-seven, English jockey-boy riding sixy stone, I 
beating him" — won the Calcutta Derby. The 
present chief, himself the most beautiful horseman 
among all the hard-riding princes of India, entered 
into his inheritance a year or so ago. He instantly 
started a racing stable in Calcutta, a stable at New- 
market, stud-farm in Australia, and, of course, every- 
thing conceivable at Jodhpur. As for the Jodhpur 
pig-sticking, is it not famous over the length and 
breadth of India? The Jodhpur Imperial Service 
Lancers are as smart a tent-pegging corps as exists 
in the world. A member of the Royal Family, re- 
turning from the Jubilee of '87, brought with him, as 
the best of our contributions to human wellbeing, a 

28 



The Most Sporting Country in the World 

hansom cab, which he personally drove across coun- 
try. Briefly, Jodhpur spells horse. The small-talk 
of a hunting county is varied and cosmopolitan beside 
that of Jodhpur. Even in Newmarket there are some 
half-a-dozen people who have no visible connection 
with racing. Altogether Jodhpur can probably claim 
without arrogance to be the most sporting country in 
the whole world. 

The territory of the State of Marwar, whereof it 
is the capital, lies in the western part of Rajputana. 
Fringing the great Indian desert, it is itself half- 
desert, with a scanty rainfall and a sandy soil. An 
ideal rain first breaks up the hard ground in early 
June, then falls lightly till September, when, the sort 
of millet on which the Marwaris live being hus- 
banded, another heavy fall is desirable to fill the tanks 
for the cold weather. But ideal rains are rare, and 
Marwar is a relatively sterile country — level and soft- 
going for horses, though perhaps a little heavy for 
training racers — but none too rich even in grass, and 
niggardly of food to men. 

So that a generation ago the natural disadvantages 
of the country having been sedulously supplemented 
by mismanagement, the State was bankrupt, the peo- 
ple were crushed by taxation, the Government was a 
mass of corrupt inepitude, a Government only in 
name. Then came a man, an English resident, who 
knew how to w"6rk on the pride of the Rajput, the 
son of fifty generations of kings : he made men of 

29 , 



The Most Sporting Country in the World 

them and a State of Marwar. To this day they quote 
his admonitions with a simple adoration, half-childish, 
half-manly. "This sahib very fine rider, good for 
polo-play, good for pig-shtickin'. This sahib telling 
me, you gentleman hai^ do gentleman things, work 
like gentleman." 

They did work like gentlemen. They did not build 
a museum and a school of art, as did the neighbour- 
ing State, where a Bengali babu is Prime Minister ; 
but they put the taxation and law courts on a footing 
of rough-and-ready justice, they ventilated the jail, 
and especially made a branch line to connect with the 
Rajputana railway. At the urgent instance of the 
superintendent of their railway, they made a great res- 
ervoir to hold the summer rain and an aqueduct to 
bring it to the city. In dry seasons the people used 
to have to migrate elsewhere ; now they get suffi- 
ciency, if not abundance, of water throughout the 
worst of years. They have instituted a little Decau- 
ville railway to carry the sewage out of the city ; they 
have made roads all round their city and planted trees 
— ^you may see the young ones, each in a cup of care- 
fully moistened mud and fenced with a wall of 
mimosa thorn — where before was nothing but desert. 

Conceiving the British to be the only true sports- 
men in the world besides themselves, the men of Mar- 
war are loyal beyond suspicion to their suzerain. 
They look on their Resident not as a spy or a task- 
master, but as a friend. " You thinking, sahib, being 

30 



The Most Sporting Country in the World 

more war soon ? " they will ask him anxiously, for 
they ask no better than to have a chance of showing 
what their cavalry can do for the Empress. 

But with all the modern improvements and the 
British sympathy, Marwar is not over-governed. Its 
political life is simple like itself. State affairs are not 
neglected, but the cavalry and the polo, the racing and 
the pig-sticking, remain the serious business of life. 
The horse, who abases the base, is to these simple 
aristocrats the salt that keeps their life sweet and 
clean. He keeps them in a happy mean between the 
half-baked civilisation of the babu and the besotted 
sensuality of the old Asiatic rulers. He solves for 
them the great problem of the ruling races of India 
' — how to employ themselves innocuously now that in 
India there is no more war. 

How simple and manly they remain you may easily 
gather from half an hour with such of them as have 
been to England. Petted in London drawing-rooms, 
pampered at Ascot, admitted to easy intercourse with 
Royalty, they remain unaffected, modest, sincere, now 
exploding in boyish laughter, now gravely respectful 
to the sahib as to a father. The babu, you see, feel- 
ing himself inferior at heart, is jerkily familiar ; the 
Jodhpur Rajput, knowing himself your equal, can 
afford to call you Sahib and salaam. The intimacy 
of princes cannot raise him ; the friendship of the 
plainest cannot lower him. He is a Rathore Rajput ; 
he can never be more, and he can never be less. 

31 



V 
A RAJPUT CITY 

The Rathores, the ruling family of Jodhpur, are 
probably — bracketed with one or two other Rajput 
stocks — the most noble house in the world. Their 
pedigree begins with the beginning of time, but for 
practical purposes it need not be followed back be- 
yond 470 A. D. At that time they are certainly 
known to have been kings ; and kings they have been 
ever since — at first in Kanauj, in the Ganges Valley, 
and afterwards, driven thence, in Rajputana. In the 
undesirable scrub and desert they cut out their king- 
dom, and perched their fort on the rock ; seven cen- 
turies of unequal war with Afghan and Mogul em- 
perors, with Maratha rievers and with their brother 
States of Rajputana, had left them faint but surviv- 
ing, when the British Peace came to give them rest. 

As the Rajputs are the purest blood of India, so 
their social structure is the oldest — a mixture of feu- 
dalism and clanship, where the nobles hold the lands 
their ancestors won in war or received from kings as 
younger sons' portions. Elsewhere in India the Ma- 
harajah is the State and his subjects nothing j in Raj- 
putana he is the head of the family, first among his 

32 



A Rajput City 

peers. The lower castes, descendants of the con- 
quered aborigines, are nothing ; but the poorest Raj- 
put is kin to the king. 

The cenotaphs of the Rathore rulers are at Mandor, 
three miles out. There they had their capital before, 
in 1459, Jodha built his castle above the city that 
bears his name ; and here their ashes were buried. 
Through a gate of carved stone, you come into a 
garden cool with green leaves, starred with ruddy- 
purple bougainvillea, blooming richly under the brow 
of bare precipices. Beyond are the tombs — tapering 
masses of dark, red-brown stone, as proud as pyra- 
mids, as graceful as spires. Terrace rises from 
square arch, pillar and capital climb above terrace ; 
over all towers a cone-shaped dome — not the plain 
dome we know, but the union of a multitude of tiny 
ones running one into the other, till the whole is 
ribbed and fluted and looks like a pine-apple. From 
a coping-stone here, from a seam in the pine-apple 
there, looks out the sculptured head of the royal ele- 
phant. At one tomb, says the custodian with a tear 
for the past and a sigh for the degenerate present, no 
less than eighty-four widows were burned. 

But before you come to the cenotaphs of the kings, 
— and this is the point, as illustrating Rajput society, 
— you will have passed a gallery something between 
statuary and fresco. Under a colonnade is a huge 
procession of coloured figures in relief — colossal and 
crude, with faces like the necklaced cats you buy in 

33 



A Rajput City 

china shops, and horses less horse-like than the toys 
of our childhood. They are so naively hideous, the 
contrast between the babyish statuary and the effort- 
less, masterly architecture is so astounding, that you 
ask the Vakil whether these are not gods. The Vakil 
is officially a sort of agent between the Marwar 
Government and the Resident, and personally a 
pleasant, dark-faced, black-moustached young man in 
a sweater and tunic and the celebrated Jodhpur riding- 
breeches. " No, sir, not god," he replies. " Kings, 
then ? " " No, sir, not king — gentleman — like me." 
These are heroes who have distinguished themselves 
in war — not monarchs, not necessarily of the imme- 
diate Royal Family; simply Rajputs, "gentleman, 
like me," and as such fitted for any gallery of glories. 
In the city that nestles under the sheer scarped rock 
you will see those who are not Rajputs — the subjects. 
Driving in through the gate, under the battlements of 
the broad, crumbling wall, you are instantly in com- 
plete India, unspoiled and unimproved. Jodhpur has 
its Decauville railway, you are aware ; it also has its 
froward camels, who lie down across the High Street 
and refuse to move for royal carriages. Over any 
booth in the bazaar, on any poor man's house, you 
will see stonework — latticed windows, mouldings, 
traceries, cornices overhanging the street — so exquis- 
ite that they seem wafted out of a fairy tale. Yet, 
when it wanted but another foot of stone, another 
week of work, to be perfect, the artist broke off, and 

34 



A Rajput City 

the delicate masterpiece is finished by a few rough- 
hewn slabs piled on anyhow, a mat or a heap of sods, 
a paintless broken shutter framed in a jewel of carv- 
ing. It is the East, you murmur, enraptured — the 
undiluted East at last, opulent, shiftless, grotesque, 
magical. There is a temple — pure Orient. The 
central shrine rises in tiers of jutting eaves like a pa- 
goda; the front is an embroidery of stone screens; 
down over the windows droop long crescent-shaped 
cornices like a gull's wings ; at each side of the en- 
trance-steps stands a marble-elephant, all straight lines 
and square corners, as if it had just stepped out of a 
Noah's ark. Passing on, you catch a glimpse of an- 
other facade of tracery, lavished on a street a yard 
wide where nobody could ever see it ; on the other 
side, over a bunch of wood-and-straw hovels on a 
rock, soars another pine-apple dome. There is an- 
other marvel of stonework, arches and window-frames 
finished with the finger-nail but blending into one long 
harmonious front; the thousand points of its cornice 
overhang a row of shabby shops, whose fires have 
blackened the fretwork with generations of smoke. 

This is surely pure East. Your eye has strung it- 
self to the high tones of colour by now, and what at 
first only dazzled now shows you shades and sym- 
phonies. The people group themselves for you : 
every window-space and roof is full of their radiance. 
Blues soften from cobalt through peacock to indigo; 
turbans are no longer merely flaring red or yellow, 

35 



A Rajput City 

but .magenta, crimson, flame-colour, salmon-colour, 
gold, orange, lemon. The group of women bunched 
in the street in worn garments is a study in brick-red 
and old gold. Every shop in the bazaar — an old man 
squatting among metal pots, a boy with liquid eyes 
dilating at the unknown sahib, both in a bare cube of 
dirty plaster four steps above the street — becomes a 
picture in its frame. Here is the Royal Mint, and 
they bring you a chair to see the fashioning of gold 
mohurs and silver rupees. One man weighs out the 
metal, another fuses it in a blow-pipe flame to a fat 
disc, another holds it on a die, and yet another smites 
it with a die-hammer. The coin jumps out jingling, 
and they will sell it you warm ; only the mauve-clad 
master of the mint forgets how much it is worth, and 
will send you your change to-morrow. Next, jingling 
bells and flinging abroad their harlequin rags of yellow, 
dull red and citron, come a group of fakirs ; round the 
next corner is a yet holier man, flowing grey-bearded, 
his face white with ashes ; turn again and a votary is 
sitting cross-legged on an empty petroleum-box with 
his nose against a six-armed, three-headed, monkey- 
grinned god. Then you pass through a wide market, 
floored with sacks of corn and roofed with clouds of 
blue pigeons, to the tank — a sheet of green-gold water 
walled with stone, with parapets and broad staircases, 
and at the foot of each, purple- or brown- or carna- 
tion-clad women dipping with shining brass. 

Oh yes, pure East — and here vaguely sways an ele- 

36 



A Rajput City 

phant up the street ; and there — there — O disillusion ! 
— a little shabby box on wheels switchbacks along 
little rails, bumps into camels, jaggernauts over lop- 
eared goats, and bears the inscription, " Jodhpur 
Tramways." And now I see, amid strange vegetables 
and fruits, amid loin-clothed bakers kneading strange 
dough into strange confectionery, cheap, gaudy Ger- 
man pictures, illuminated for the export market, daub- 
ing native gods even more brutally hideous than the 
reality. 

Alas ! there seems no East without its smudge of 
West. Come up to the fort on the rock ; perhaps we 
shall find an untainted sanctuary there. The rock 
springs sheer up from the nestling town, every face 
scarped into smooth precipice ; the ancient palace of 
the Rathores lifts its diadem from the summit. To 
reach the zigzags that climb to it you must sweep all 
round the city, up rock-fringed serpentines ; and when 
you have climbed to the gate the palace seems more 
inaccessibly lofty than before. 

Look up. White walls, half bastion, half Titanic 
pillar, mount up and up ; small over your head, up in 
the very sky, leaning over dizzy nothing, hang blush- 
red fairy houses with pin-point windows. Under a 
frowning gateway, past the trapping-houses of the 
royal elephants, turn, and up another steep-walled 
slope, another — there are the rough heaps of stone 
still in place to hurl down on to a storming party — till 
you come to another tall, grim gateway. Here on 

n 



A Rajput City- 
slabs on either side you see the rough prints of hands 
— five on the right, some thirty on the left — each the 
mark of a queen as she came down from the fort for 
the last time to be burned with her dead lord. 

You still feel like a beetle as you look up at the 
brows of the palace, but there is only one long ramp 
to pull up. And then you stand in front of buildings 
laced all over with carving, rigid as the stone it is, 
light as the air it breathes. You pass from arch to 
arch, to court within court, till you are mazed with 
gull-wing window-shades, lattice-windows, fretted 
screens, thousand-pointed pendent cornices, the epit- 
ome of all the beauties below. Description melts 
away powerless before the myriad touches, the 
majestic whole : you can only murmur, a fairy tale 
charmed into stone. 

And then when you go into the royal saloons 
you find them illuminated like an old missal with 
labyrinths of gold and azure and scarlet, lustrous 
with gold and rose-coloured silks, and furnished with 
the crudest, ugliest, gaudiest, vulgarest drawing-room 
suites and ottomans and occasional tables. You look 
for the ticket on the back : " In this style, complete, 
one million rupees." And the richest apartment of 
all is bile and jaundice with cheap green and yellow 
panes from the window of a suburban lavatory ! 

Yet it is very good. They can turn splendour into 
grotesqueness, but after all they will hardly face the 
stone poetry with red brick and stucco. And there 

38 



A Rajput City 

always remains the fort. The rows of guns on the 
terrace — from the little dragon-mouthed, dragon-tailed 
one, almost scraping ground with its fat belly, to 
the black four-wheeled leviathan that must have used 
up elephants on elephants to mount here — the antique 
guns will always look out to the white and green 
checker-board of Jodhpur. At sundown, when the 
mile-long columns of cattle trail in from pasture, 
and the golden clouds rise up from the Prime 
Minister's polo-ground, the naked rock and hard- 
browed walls stand up, steadfast, indestructible, 
proud, above the dust-veil and the city sheltering at 
their feet. At sundown they are lambent in every 
seam and wrinkle with cold violet-blue ; at dawn they 
will glow with hot carmine 5 but always they will be 
there. The city may change, the cattle and the very 
polo may pass away ; but, night and morning, the 
fastness of the Rathores will endure for ever. 



39 



VI 
THE CAMP OF EXERCISE 

The Inspector-General of Cavalry had his camp 
under the further side of the Ridge. Its flawless 
order was a joy to see — the unswerving straight lines 
of the roads, the exact set of the tents, with the occu- 
pant's name on each and his servants' tent behind, the 
abundance of fodder in the horse-lines, the spreading 
office- and mess-tents. These were floored with mat- 
ting and furnished with desks and easy-chairs. In the 
smaller officers' tents you saw writing-tables and 
dressing-tables perfectly set out. In India your tent 
is more than half a home, and what India does not 
know of camping is misleading heresy. 

A mile beyond was encamped the Southern Divi- 
sion, five miles beyond that the Northern. In this 
winter weather — and, oh, how wintry it is, once you 
get out of the sun ! — English hours rule : we get up 
comfortably at daybreak, eat a lordly breakfast at 
nine, and jog off in the dust at ten to see the day's 
fight. The Inspector-General rides off with about a 
dozen of a staff: such luxuries as D.A.Q.M.G.'s are 
never stinted in India. With them rides a young 

40 



The Camp of Exercise 

maharajah in khaki, very frank and manly, carrying 
good-comradeship to the point of larking with British 
officers, but eating his sandwich and plain soda alone 
like a self-respecting Hindu — not at all your idea of 
the oriental potentate. The leaf-fringed road is lively 
with horsemen and horsewomen, dogcarts, and the 
miraculous native cabs of Delhi. They look half 
jaunting-car, half ice-cream barrow — a gay-painted 
box, on whose lid two or four people squat cross- 
legged, back to back, under a shabby canvas awning. 
Also any number of natives on foot pad out to see 
the sahibs play at war. 

Just past the Northern camp we came to the line 
of the East Indian Railway, at a point where its em- 
bankment was pierced by a bridge. Roughly parallel 
to the line was the road ; between, the ground was 
level, but for two or three hillocks to the left of the 
bridge, and covered with rough grass. The other 
side of the line was similar ground for the best part of 
a mile, only broken by a mass of tumble-down walls 
just opposite the debouch from the bridge, and finally 
ringed in by a semicircle of thick trees. This was 
the scene of the day's work. The bridge represented 
a defile, and was the only way from one side of the 
line to the other; the rule was that, though dis- 
mounted men might line the railway bank, nobody 
was to cross it. 

Beyond the line we saw the black ranks of nine 
squadrons of cavalry and a horse-battery. It was just 

41 



The Camp of Exercise 

eleven o'clock, and as we saw, they formed into 
column and started to pass through to our side of the 
bridge. They were going to look for the enemy, who 
was advancing from somewhere the other side of the 
road. When they found him, they would reconnoitre 
him J and if he proved too strong to be fought in the 
open, would retire and attack him as he passed the de- 
file. As it happened, everybody knew he would be 
too strong ; he had thirteen squadrons of the twenty- 
two — six regiments, two British and four native — 
which made up the whole division. Then the weaker 
commander, knowing the ground on his side of the 
bridge, might attack the stronger force as they came 
in column through the defile, and roll them up before 
they had time to deploy and make their numbers tell. 
It was a very pretty problem. 

Out came the weaker force from the railway bridge. 
" Hang the men ! " muttered the Inspector-General. 
" Why don't they come faster ? They'll get jammed 
under the bridge." The general is a great race-rider 
and pig-sticker, and a very hot man all round, and 
especially he realises the vital value of pace in war as 
in sport. Next instant they quickened to a trot ; a 
scrunching roar showed that the guns were coming 
through, and the long columns were half-way to the 
road. 

It was my first sight of Indian cavalry, and I looked 
curiously. Bigger than the down-country natives I 
had seen hitherto, they were very light men compared 

42 



The Camp of Exercise 

with Europeans — small-boned and spare. That was 
the first idea; the second was that they would be bad 
men to pursue and worse still to run from. Dark- 
skinned, black-bearded, keen-eyed, swinging easily in 
the body and gripping the horse hermetically with the 
legs, they looked born troopers all over — swift and 
fierce and tireless. Their uniform was in their 
character — huge turbans, blue, blue and white, blue 
and red or crimson, lowering over bushy brows and 
wild eyes, and dancing in the breeze behind long 
tunics of dark blue or khaki, relieved by brilliant 
kummerbunds, breeches like divided skirts, and tight 
putties below. It was almost startling to see white 
officers in such a kit — a brick-burned face with yel- 
low eyebrows and moustache looking out from under 
a peaked cap of scarlet velvet with a vast blue turban 
wound round it ; a huge chest under a khaki tunic, 
whose long tails proclaim it first cousin of the 
oriental shirt ; a broad scarlet kummerbund under the 
regulation belt ; orange breeches, and long black 
boots. It was one more revelation of the wonderful 
Englishman who can make himself into half a savage 
to make savages into half-civilised men. 

By this time the force was across the road, and 
before it stretched miles and miles of yellow grass, 
sparsely tufted with a few bushes — the ideal of 
cavalry ground. Already, far ahead of the long lines 
that walked warily forward, groups of little ant-like 
creatures trailed swiftly over this plain : they were 

43 



The Camp of Exercise 

officers* patrols, an officer and a man or two going 
forward to feel for the enemy. They went on, till 
from ants they became black dots, then stopped. On 
the bushy horizon appeared other dots — the enemy's 
patrols. Then all the dots moved again, — going on ? 
— coming back ? — yes, coming back at a racing gal- 
lop. The dot came back to an ant, and the ant sud- 
denly leaped into a tearing horse and man, bringing 
the kind of news which in the real thing may mean 
life or death to regiments or armies or nations. The 
hindmost were dodging pursuers ; one or two were 
taken ; but before there was time to watch the last, 
the first had reported: the lines of riders and the 
guns whipped round and moved briskly back towards 
the road and the defile. 

A belch of smoke from the plain and a muffied 
thud, another, another : the superior force's guns had 
seen the retreating masses and opened fire. Then a 
grating bang close by : the opposing battery had un- 
limbered and was replying. But that will not do for 
long when you are retreating with calvary at your 
heels : after two or three rounds the teams clattered 
up, the guns swung round, and were off again ; and 
the next thing was that the plain was black with the 
advancing squadrons of the stronger side, and the 
weaker had disappeared off the earth. 

Slowly, cautiously, the attackers crept up, straining 
their eyes, moving behind huts or hillocks, edging off 
flankwards among trees. They had need of all their 

44 



The Camp of Exercise 

caution: a squadron was moving across the front 
along the road when — crack, crack, crack-k-kle — dis- 
mounted squadrons were firing at it from the embank- 
ment on both sides of the bridge. The guns opened, 
too, from beyond the line. The weaker force was 
there, prepared to show his teeth. The thing to do 
was to contain his fire with artillery and dismounted 
men, and then slam in the rest of cavalry through the 
defile. In the mouth of the bridge we waited and 
waited ; but for the carbine-fire on the line the place 
seemed empty. Then suddenly on the attacking 
side guns appeared behind the mounds, separated 
into teams and pieces, and fired. Khaki figures 
were kneeling under cover on either side the guns, 
firing. The whole place was a roar and a rattle — 
till dashed out a cloud of wild horsemen, tossing 
lance-points, flying puggaris, steaming towards the 
bridge. 

Now ! Beyond the bridge the dismounted squad- 
rons of the defenders were hurrying down the bank 
to their horses. For the rest, the plain seemed empty. 
The head of the on-coming lancers thrust through 
the bridge, and swung rightward in a lengthening 
column. But all in an instant a squadron in line 
burst from behind the ruined walls, then another, and 
bore down at a thundering gallop. The first met the 
first squadron of the assailants, which had wheeled 
into line ; the second caught the second squadron still 
in column, and would have crumpled it up. Now 

45 



The Camp of Exercise 

more and more riders were pouring through the defile, 
more pouring down to meet them. 

Cease fire ! It is the annoying thing about ma- 
noeuvres that they have to stop just at the exciting 
point. All you could say of this fight was that in 
real life the best men would probably have won. So 
now back to lunch in the sumptuous mess-tent of a 
hussar regiment. Think of it ! War till lunch-time 
— then pate-de~foie-gras, champagne, and ladies. In 
the afternoon the Southern Division went through 
the same exercise, only this time it was the superior 
force dismounted men on the bank, and hammered 
away with carbines and with guns — at nothing. Of 
the defenders, not one sign ! The assailants came 
through and deployed — one squadron straight forward, 
one half-right, one half-left. Still nothing ; till, all at 
once — bang, bang, bang ! — three guns, wide apart, 
fired full into the centre squadron, and the plain 
came to life. At each squadron that had come 
through galloped a squadron from out of the trees. 
The arena was a thunder of hoofs, a criss-cross of 
rigid lines — khaki, blue, crimson, steel — hurling them- 
selves straight at each other from every point ; then 
— cease fire ! 

Again the best men would have won, though the 
first squadron through would have been knocked to 
pieces. But the next day we won — we all won — for 
we were the British-India army fighting an imaginary 
enemy. On each flank of a ridge one division formed 

46 



The Camp of Exercise 

up. Guns opened from our ridge and from the 
enemy's opposite ; in the dip between our infantry 
and theirs were seen mutually advancing with a splut- 
ter of fire. The idea was that the Russians — I mean 
the enemy — were too strong for our infantry and 
guns, and that the cavalry was to retrieve the day : 
what more congenial ? The left flank division was 
to get behind the enemy's right rear, take his guns, 
crumple up his reserves, and then come on to support 
the right division, which was meanwhile to crumple 
up his cavalry and then pursue. A few minutes we 
watched the skeleton infantry blaze away ; then the 
cavalry went. Going forward to the enemy's left, we 
saw the troopers of our leftward division galloping up 
behind his right flank — single riders, groups, lines 
black and fast and terrible filling up the ground. 
Then came our right division at the charge against 
the flags that marked the imaginary squadrons — ofllicers 
well ahead, dark masses behind them extending and 
quickening, extending and quickening, over rock and 
furrow and fissure. Then a furious thudding — and 
they were on us, manes flying, horse-heads tossing, 
knife-edged shrieks from the sowars and breathless 
" Damns ! " from the British — a thunder, a whirl, a 
cloud of dust — and they were tearing up the earth a 
quarter of a mile beyond. It was as thick and yellow 
with dust as a London fog : you were lost in it — and 
then, before you could see ten yards, another thunder. 
The other division whirlwinded past in support and 

47 



The Camp of Exercise 

pursuit — an overtaking blur in the dust-fog, a rushing 
phantom of manes and leaping puggaris and gleaming 
white eyeballs, and then a diminishing thunder in the 
dust again. 

In the pursuit I should prefer to be on the side of 
the British-India cavalry. 

That was the last day of active operations. For 
the wind-up there was a grand open-air Military 
Tournament between the camps, with jumps, and 
tent-pegging, and guns minuetting at the gallop, 
and all the other joys ; also — lest they forget — native 
women peeping through the closed shutters of car- 
riages, and native men standing on their horses to 
see over the crowd. It was all very fine and enjoy- 
able — only to read it now you naturally think it a 
little dull. Perhaps ; but still you may be glad to 
know what the British army — the real British army 
— looks like and does and is in the country where it 
exists for business. For to find the real British army 
you must go to India. Thousands of our people at 
home pass their lives without ever seeing a ^soldier, 
millions without ever seeing a brigade. Perhaps one 
in ten thousand of home-keeping Britons has seen 
more than one regiment of cavalry together. India is 
otherwise. Here also, it is true, there are broad 
countries — Bengal, for instance, with three-fourths of 
the area of France, and nearly twice the population 
of the British Isles — which hardly ever see a bayonet 
or a lance. But to other districts — the great canton- 

48 



The Camp of Exercise 

ments and the garrisons of the North- West Frontier 
— the sight of regiments and brigades is as familiar as 
that of policemen to you. 

So that it was nothing for India to have twelve 
regiments of cavalry, with four batteries of horse 
artillery, assembled for the camp of exercise. It 
would be difficult to assemble this force in England — 
there only are fourteen regiments in Great Britain — 
and when it was assembled it would have no room to 
move ; even Salisbury Plain hardly supplies recon- 
noitring ground for a single day. But the whole of 
Northern India consists of one single alluvial plain, 
nearly as large as France, Germany, and Austria put 
together, with hardly a hill and hardly a stone 
throughout the length and breadth of it. You can 
find tracts as large as English countries with scarcely 
a crop to ride over. Not that crops would stop the 
manoeuvres, or anything else ; for in India the army 
is taken seriously. 

If you do not find good cavalry and lifelike cavalry 
manoeuvres in India, therefore, you may despair of 
British military organisation at once. But you do find 
them. Every year the Inspector-General of Cavalry 
fixes the time when regiments are marching across 
country changing stations, selects his force, and then 
sets them to march at each other. This year part of 
the force took the field at Umballa and part at 
Aligarh — two hundred miles apart. By easy marches, 
but making up good days' work with manoeuvres by 

49 



The Camp of Exercise 

the way, they converged on Delhi. When the South- 
ern Division was within a dozen miles or so of the 
city, it was met by a skeleton force holding a village 
and railway junction, which it had to dislodge. Next 
day the Northern regiments were reconnoitred by a 
similar skeleton force, which it was their business to 
push back without revealing their strength. The day 
after that the two divisions came into collision and 
fought, after which each went into standing camp. 
Next came another couple of engagements between 
them; then the two fights at the defile you have just 
heard of; then the combined attack on the skeleton 
enemy. Upon each day's operations the Inspector- 
General delivered brief but complete criticisms. 
Everything was business-like, thorough ; in India — 
except perhaps in the Government offices — they 
realise that the army exists to fight, and give their 
minds to fit it for fighting. 

You would be surprised to find how much thinking 
out, and what lightning-rapid thinking out, a cavalry 
action requires. It is not at all just a matter of slam- 
ming your men at the enemy, and hoping they will be 
too good for him. For instance, if your cavalry is 
masking your own guns while your enemy's are knock- 
ing holes out of your line just before the moment of 
collision, the best men in the world will be hardly 
good enough for the worst. Points like this will take 
a deal of study, and it seems that even now there is 
room for new ideas. The Inspector-General's is that 

50 



The Camp of Exercise 

cavalry advancing in three lines ought to throw their 
guns right forward. It sounds almost blasphemous to 
put precious, tender guns in the forefront of every- 
thing. But then you must remember that horse artil- 
lery can move quickly, if necessary, and especially 
that cavalry can move quickly enough to come up in 
eiFective support at the shortest notice of danger ; and 
the forward position of the guns may give vast advan- 
tages. The guns that are up in front are likely to 
come first into action, and may cripple, sometimes 
actually defeat, the enemy before he can retaliate. 
They are more likely to have him in effective range 
at the moment when the cavalry shock comes. Espe- 
cially this formation may often give the leader who 
adopts it the choice of ground. Suppose your enemy 
gets into attack formation on the left of his guns, you 
will probably move forward your cavalry to the left of 
your own guns. Then the enemy can only get at 
you either by moving across behind his guns under 
fire of yours, or else in front of them, and masking 
them while you pound him. On the other hand, if 
the ground suits you better on the right of the guns, 
you move to that side : in any case you dictate the 
ground. 

That is the theory ; it must take a quick eye and a 
quick hand to bring it successfully into practice. With 
the view of giving officers the best chance of bringing 
off such rapid movements, the new idea in India is 
that the commander should ride well to the front of 

51 



The Camp of Exercise 

his main body, and with him the leaders of his three 
lines of cavalry and of his artillery. When the en- 
emy's strength, formation, and line of advance are 
observed, there is still time for these leaders to gallop 
back to their men vi^ith verbal orders from the com- 
mander; vi^hich, having seen the enemy at his side, 
they are certain to understand. The commander re- 
mains in front to see vi^hether the enemy changes his 
tactics at the last moment ; if he does, the subordinate 
leaders, having seen, are still in a better position to 
understand their final orders. 

Another point insisted on is the importance of send- 
ing forward selected officers on selected horses to ob- 
serve the enemy at the earliest possible moment. 
Your ordinary eye might not take in the situation 
instantly ; your ordinary horse might be caught by the 
enemy. As the advanced patrols are the eyes of the 
cavalry, and the cavalry is the eye of the whole army, 
you cannot have men or beasts too good for such 
work. 

For example, they must usually be British officers. 
The native officer, with all his many fine qualities, has 
not, as a rule, the trained intelligence, observation, and 
self-control necessary for such work. It has been 
urged by a few good judges, and many bad ones, that 
the present status of the native officers is unsatisfac- 
tory, because they have no opportunities of rising to 
the highest commissioned ranks. At the time of the 
camp of exercise we were hearing a good deal of this 

52 



The Camp of Exercise 

from London and Calcutta, but not, curiously, from 
the native regiments at Delhi. The complaint is 
loudest — need it be said ? — among Bengalis, who do 
not, and never will, furnish a single native officer or 
sepoy to the whole Indian army. The manlier races 
make no such claim for themselves : the native officer 
is content with his present position, and finds his 
present duties sufficiently honourable and responsible. 
Three distinctions the native officer receives, and 
dearly prizes, from his white superior. The Briton 
shakes hands with him — it breaks a Hindu's caste, but 
still he likes it — calls him Sahib, and acknowledges 
his right to sit on a chair. He can rise to resaldar- or 
subadar-major, which is a grade between captain and 
major. In the cavalry — where prompt and unswerv- 
ing decision is especially required — the squadrons are 
led by Europeans ; the company commanders of the 
infantry are native subadars. With these privileges 
and duties, the fighting races — being simple-minded, 
and conceiving the British to be in most points a 
superior race — are well satisfied. The Prime Minis- 
ter of Nepal has actually made it a condition of the 
supply of Ghurka recruits that they must always be 
led by Englishmen. 

It is true that the limited field of ambition may dis- 
incline some of the best elements among the ruling 
classes from the military career, which would be their 
natural vocation. But the general view appears to be 
that this is inevitable. In the first place, it is none so 

53 



The Camp of Exercise 

certain that the ruling classes want commissions. The 
flower of Indian chivalry, the Rajputs, certainly prefer 
the soldiering they get in their own Imperial Service 
Corps to a life which, after all, whatever prospects 
might be opened to native officers, must always bring 
them into direct subordination to a British officer of 
one rank or another. A maharajah will usually be 
loath to obey even a major-general. The practical 
difficulties, too, would be great, not to say insuperable. 
It would be difficult to mix British and native officers 
in one regiment ; when a man's religion forbids him 
to eat with you or touch your hand, it must needs 
militate against corporate spirit in a mess. To officer 
battalions and regiments wholly with natives would be 
equally difficult : the more warlike races have not as 
yet made much progress in education, and they are apt 
to lose their heads in action through untempered gal- 
lantry. Left to himself, the native officer will some- 
times forget to give his men the range, or charge at 
large on sight. With British officers he remains cool, 
having no more responsibility than he is equal to, and 
plays an invaluable part. You must remember that 
fighting in these latter days is becoming as complex as 
quadratic equations, with a good deal more to flurry 
the operator. When a Sikh or a Path an or a Ghurka 
passes into Sandhurst it will be time to consider the 
question further. 

Certainly the native officers did not look a discon- 
tented class. As they marched past Sir George Luck 

54 



The Camp of Exercise 

at the end of the manoeuvres, stiff yet easy in 'the 
saddle, and flashed their tulwars in the salute, they 
bristled with pride in their position — behind the sahibs, 
ahead of the men. 



55 



VII 
DELHI 

Delhi is the most historic city in all historic India. 
It may not be the oldest — who shall say which is the 
oldest among rivals all coeval with time ? — though it 
puts in a claim for a respectable middle-age, dating 
from 1000 b. c. or so. It has at least one authentic 
monument which is certainly fourteen or fifteen hun- 
dred years old. At that time Delhi's master called 
himself Emperor of the World, and emperors, at least 
of India, have ruled there almost ever since. Mo- 
hammed, an Afghan of Ghor, took it in 1193 ; Tam- 
erlane, the Mogul, sacked it two hundred years later ; 
Nadir Shah, the Persian, in 1739; Ahmed Shah " 
Durani, another Afghan, in 1756 ; the Marathas took 
it three years later. Half a century on, in 1803, 
General Lake took the capital of India for Britain. 
And British it has been ever since — except for those 
few months in 1857, when the Mutiny brought the 
ghost of the Mogul empire into the semblance of life 
again ; till Nicholson stormed the breach in the Kash- 
mir Bastion, and dyed Delhi British for ever with his 
blood. 

Look from the Ridge, whence the columns marched 

56 



Delhi 

out to that last capture : the battered trophy of so 
many conquerors remains wonderfully fresh and fair. 
It seems more like a wood than a city. The rolls of 
green are only spangled with white, as if it were a 
suburb of villas standing in orchards. Only the 
snowy domes and tall minarets, the cupolas and gilded 
pinnacles, betray the still great and populous city that 
nestles below you and takes breath after her thousand 
troubles. 

Yet Delhi is still seamed with the scars of her 
spoilers, and still jewelled with remnants of the gems 
they fought for. If you take them in order, you will 
go first, not into the city, but eleven miles south, to 
the tower Kutb Minar. Through the dust of the 
road, rising out of the springing wheat, among the 
mud-and-mat huts before which squat the brown- 
limbed peasants, you see the country a litter of broken 
walls, tumbling towers, rent domes. There are frag- 
ments of seven cities built by seven kings before the 
present Delhi was. Eleven miles of them bring you 
to the tower and mosque of Kutb. 

Kutb-ed-Din was a slave who raised himself to 
Viceroy of Delhi when the Mussulmans took it, then 
to Emperor of Hindustan and founder of a dynasty. 
Whether he or his son or the last of the Hindu kings 
built the tower, antiquaries are undecided and others 
careless. It is enough that here is one landmark in 
Delhi's history, one splendid monument reared for a 
symbol of triumph by a victor whom now nobody can 

57 



Delhi 

certainly identify. It is a colossal, five-storeyed tower, 
two hundred and forty feet high, of nearly fifty feet 
diameter at the base, and tapering to nine feet at the 
top. Tiny balconies with balustrades mark the junc- 
tions of the storeys : the three lower are red stone, 
the two upper — dwarfed just under the sky — faced 
with white marble. All the red part is fluted into al- 
ternate semicircles and right angles, netted all over 
with tracery, and belted with inscriptions under the 
balconies. But the details strike you little : the ver- 
tical lines of the fluting only give the impression that 
this is one huge pillar with a red shaft and a white 
capital — a pillar that might form part of the most tre- 
mendous temple in the world, yet stands quite seemly 
alone by reason of its surpassing bigness. 

Pant to the top. It will do you good, though the 
view is nothing. The country is an infinite green- 
and-brown chess-board of young corn and fallow, 
dead-flat on every side, ugly with the complacent 
plainness of all very rich country. Beyond the 
sheeny ribbon of the Jumna, north, south, east, west, 
into the blurred horizon, you can see only land and 
land and land — a million acres with nothing on them 
to see — except the wealth of India and the secret of 
the greatness of Delhi. 

Then look down past your toes and you will see 
the evidence of some of Delhi's falls. From the 
ground you will have noticed ruins about you ; but 
there the Kutb Minar dwarfs everything. Now you 

58 



Delhi 

see that you stand above a field of broken arches, soli- 
tary pillars, stumps of towers, and in the middle of 
what must once have been a town of mosques and 
tombs. Before it was that, it was a town of Hindu 
temples and palaces. In the court of the ruined 
mosque stands a solid wrought-iron pillar — little 
enough to look at, but curious, because it is at least 
fifteen hundred years old, and there is nothing else 
quite like it in the world. It bears a Sanskrit inscrip- 
tion to the effect that this is " the Arm of Fame of 
Raja Dhava, who conquered his neighbours and won 
the undivided sovereignty of the earth." 

Poor Raja Dhava ! The temples of generations 
that had already forgotten him are swept utterly away ; 
the mosque of their conquerors stands now only as a 
few shattered red arches and pillars with defaced flow- 
ers wilting on them. Beyond that is the base of what 
was once to be a tower more than twice as high as 
the Kutb Minar, but was never even finished. The 
very tower you stand on has been buffeted by earth- 
quake, and great part of it is mere restoration. And 
Delhi, which in the year One stood here, has drifted 
away almost out of sight from the summit and left 
these forlorn fragments to decay without even the 
consolation of neighbourhood. 

Poets and preachers have already pointed the neces- 
sary moral : let us go back to the city. Here at least 
is the Jumma Musjid, the great mosque, saved com- 
plete out of the storms — a baby of little more than 

59 



Delhi 

two hundred years, to be sure, but still something. 
It is said to be the largest mosque in the world — 
a vast stretch of red sandstone and white marble and 
gold upstanding from a platform reached on three 
sides by flights of steps so tall, so majestically wide, 
that they are like a stone mountain tamed into order 
and proportion at an emperor's will. Above the 
brass-mounted doors rise red portals so huge that they 
almost dwarf the whole — red galleries above them, 
white marble domes above them, white marble min- 
arets rising higher yet, with pillars and cupolas and 
gilded pinnacles above all. Beside the gateways the 
walls of the quadrangle seem to creep along the 
ground ; then, at the corners, rise towers with more 
open chambers, more cupolas and gilded pinnacles. 
Within, above the cloistered quadrangle, bulge three 
pure white domes — not hemispheres, like Western 
domes, but complete globes, only sliced away at the 
base and tapering to a spike at the top — and a 
slender minaret flanks each side. 

The whole, to Western eyes, has a strange effect. 
Our own buildings are tighter together, gripped 
and focused more in one glance; over the Jumma 
Musjid your eye must wander, and then the mind 
must connect the views of the different parts. If 
you look at it near you cannot see it all; if far, it is 
low and seems to straggle. The West could hardly 
call it beautiful : it has proportion, but not compass. 
Therefore it does not abase you, as other great build- 

60 



Delhi 

ings do: somehow you have a feeling of patronage 
towards It. Yet it is most light and graceful with all 
its bulk : it seems to suit India, thus spread out to get 
its fill of the warm sun. It looks rich and lavish, as 
if space were of no account to it. 

Between this mosque and the Jumna river stands 
the fort — the ancient stronghold and palace of the 
Mogul emperors. A towering wall encloses it, 
Titanic slabs, always of the same red sandstones, 
moated and battlemented. You go in under the great 
Lahore Gate — its massiveness is lightened by more 
domes and arches, more gilt and marble on top of it, 
— you come in — alas and alas ! — to barracks and mar- 
ried quarters and commissariat stores. You look for 
turquoised hubble-bubbles, and you find the clay of 
Private Atkins. It is disillusion, and yet it is very 
Delhi. The remains of Aurungzebe's palaces are 
lost among the imperial plant of Aurungzebe's in- 
heritors. 

Yet search diligently for the remains; since, ex- 
cept in Agra, you will never find anything like it in 
the world. You come first to the Hall of Audience, 
an open redstone portico with a wall at its back, and 
are about to pass it. The gleam of marble arrests 
you. Within, against the wall. Is a slab of white 
marble ; above It a throne of the same with pillars 
and canopy. But it Is not the marble you look at — 
it is the wonderful work that veins It ; the throne Is 
embroidered with mosaic. And the wall behind is a 

6i 



Delhi 

sheet of miniature pictures — birds and flowers and 
fruit — all picked out in paint and precious stones. 
You marvel, but pass on to the Hall of Private 
Audience. Then, indeed, your breath catches with 
amazement. 

It is an open, oblong portico or pavilion on 
columns, with an arched and domed squarer pavilion 
beside it, whence a bay-window steps out of the wall 
to look over the swamps and the river below. The 
whole is all white marble asheen in the sun, but that is 
the least part of the wonder. Walls and ceilings, 
pillars and many-pointed arches, are all inlaid with 
richest, yet most delicate, colour. Gold cornices and 
scrolls and lattices frame traceries of mauve and pale 
green and soft azure. What must it have been, you 
ask yourself, when the peacock throne blazed with 
emerald and sapphire, ruby and diamond, from the 
now empty pedestal, and the plates of burnished silver 
reflected its glories from the roof? The Marathas 
melted down the ceiling, and Nadir Shah took away 
the throne to Persia; yet, even as it is, the opulence 
of it leaves you gasping. It is not gaudy, does not 
even astonish you with its costliness : it is simply 
sumptuous and luxurious, surpassing all your dreams. 

After this chaste magnificence you may refresh 
your eye with the yet purer beauty of the Moti 
Musjid, the Pearl Mosque — a fabric smaller than a 
racquet-court, walled with cool grey-veined marble, 
blotched here and there blood-red. Just a court of 

62 



Delhi 

walls moulded in a low relief, with a double row of 
three arches supporting a triple-domed roof at its end 
— simple, spotless, exquisite. 

You have passed below the cloud-capped towers, 
out of the gorgeous palaces — and here is Silver Street, 
Delhi's main thoroughfare. The pageant fades, and 
you plunge into the dense squalor which is also India. 
Along the houses run balconies and colonnades ; here 
also you see vistas of pillars and lattice-work, but the 
stone is dirty, the stucco peels, the wood lacks paint. 
The houses totter and lean together. The street is a 
mass of squatting, variegated people; bulls, in neck- 
laces of white and yellow flowers, sleep across the 
pavements, donkeys stroll into the shops, goats nibble 
at the vegetables piled for sale down the centre of the 
street, a squirrel is fighting with a caged parrot. Here 
is a jeweller's booth, gay with tawdry paint ; next, 
a baker's, with the shopkeeper snoring on his low 
counter, and everything an inch thick with dust. 
At one step you smell incense; at the next, gar- 
bage. 

Inimitable, incongruous India ! And coming out 
of the walls, still crumbling from Nicholson's cannon, 
you see mill-chimneys blackening the sky. Delhi, 
with local cotton, they tell you, can spin as fine 
as Manchester. One more incongruity ! The iron 
pillar, the ruined mosque, the jewelled halls, the 
shabby street, and now the clacking mill. That is 
the last of Delhi's myriad reincarnations. 

63 



VIII 
CALCUTTA 

There are three Calcuttas — the winter capital of 
India, the metropolis of the largest white population 
in the country, and the tightest-packed human sardine- 
tin known outside China. 

As you see it first, it is the only British town in 
India. Both as seat of Government and centre of 
European population it has taken on an English as- 
pect, which you do not find elsewhere. Not only are 
buildings English, but they are English buildings of 
good standing. The prevalent style is eighteenth- 
century classical ; the colour is the bufF-white of Re- 
gent Street. As a matter of history, the houses are 
adaptations of Italian and Sicilian models; but they 
look Greek. Almost every one has its portico, its 
Doric or Ionic pillars, its balustraded roof. In the 
filthiest native quarters you will come on such houses, 
grimy, peeling, tumbling to pieces — the homes of for- 
gotten sahibs, now forlorn islands in a lapping sea of 
bamboo shanties. Calcutta, you can see, has not 
merely a history — every town in India has that — but 
a British history. 

Its history, indeed, and its greatness are all British, 

64 



Calcutta 

wherein it is unique among Indian cities. It is not 
the cradle of British India : the cradle was Surat, 
which was opened to British trade in 1612, and in 
the Imperial Library at Calcutta you reverence, as the 
oldest archives of British India, the letters of the 
Surat factors. To the profane mind the most natural 
touch is found in the list of them, wherein an unfor- 
tunate, otherwise obscure, Val Hearst, is branded to 
eternity as " drinking sott." 

It was in 1687 that the Company came to Calcutta, 
and named Fort William after the Dutch king who 
came two years later. In those days, and long after, 
distinction between the imperial and commercial was 
not : despatches then were letters from " the gentle- 
men at Fort St. David's," and the administrator who 
now becomes an Honourable Member of Council then 
aspired to the office of Export Warehouse-keeper. 
Only in 1774, when Warren Hastings became first 
Governor-General of Bengal, with a vague superin- 
tendence over Madras and Bombay, did Calcutta begin 
to be imperial. 

The year before Fort William had been finished, 
and still remains — a ludicrous anachronism now, for 
what need could there be of a fort in Bengal ? — but 
an imposing document of Anglo-Indian history. An 
octagon of fosse and grass-grown rampart, bastion and 
curtain and sally-port, with the Governor's bufF-white 
Georgian house standing up out of it — it remains to 
remind you of what nowadays you might easily for- 

65 



Calcutta 

get : there lived strong men before the North-West 
Frontier. 

The other later public buildings of Calcutta are 
neither few nor mean, but they hardly do themselves 
justice. They either hide behind trees or else they 
step forward on to your toes, so that you must rick 
your neck to look at them. Government House is 
in the fashion. , From the high rails and sentries you 
infer that something important is within ; but unless 
you chance to turn your head in the right direction 
from the Maidan — Calcutta's park — you might live in 
the place for weeks and never see what it was. But 
when you see it, it is plainly a king's palace. De- 
signed, as everybody now knows, after Kedleston Hall, 
which Adams built, the imitation was begun by Lord 
Wellesley exactly a hundred years ago : at the time 
the Directors of the East India Company were pain- 
fully shocked at his extravagance. Government 
House stands in a garden full of lawns and tall trees. 
From the central building, which is crowned by a 
truncated dome, radiate galleries connecting with four 
wings ; so that the impression of the house from either 
side is of a light bufF semicircle with Ionic columns 
and a porch in the centre, and similar columns out- 
lining the wings. To the porch of the main entrance 
you go, a couchant sphinx on either side, up a double 
flight of steps, imperially wide; the impression of 
solidity combined with lightness is distantly suggestive 
of the Capitol at Washington. Left and right of this 

66 



Calcutta 

staircase shoot two tufted palms with ivy clinging 
round their trunks — England and India intertwining. 
Left and right and in front are antique cannon on pale 
blue carriages ; that in the middle rests between the 
wings of a dragon. 

South of the proconsulate spreads the Maidan, 
which is Arabic and Persian and Hindustani for a flat 
open space. To the profane mind the broad expanses 
of burnt grass— about a mile and a half square — sug- 
gest Clapham Common in August ; but the Maidan is 
much more. At one corner is a racecourse, else- 
where tennis-courts, golf-links, bicycle-tracks, cricket- 
pitches, riding-roads. It is an exercise-ground for 
horses and dogs, a playground for children, and a fash- 
ionable promenade for all Calcutta. In the evening, 
when the sky is red over the bank of factory-smoke 
beyond the Hughli, and the spars and tackle of the 
ships and barks are silhouetted on it like diagrams, the 
unending file of carriages rolls up and down the balus- 
traded Red Road, or lingers over the river to watch 
the cool sunset. Then the band plays in the Eden 
Gardens, and Calcutta promenades at ease till it is 
time to dress for dinner. The Maidan is very English 
— Clapham Common, Hyde Park, and Sandown Park 
all in one — a necessity of English life. And the 
statues with which it is starred everywhere — Hardinge, 
Lawrence, Mayo, Outram, DufFerin Roberts — are also 
part of the life, the imperial life of British India. 

Part of the life also is on the river, for the Hughli 

67 



Calcutta 

Is as essential a limb of Calcutta as the Thames is of 
London. In the days when Simla was not, Viceroy 
and merchants alike retreated out of the city stenches 
to Barrackpur and other spots on the riverside. For 
two hours you steam, first past the black-funnelled 
liners and the black-smoked chimneys, then through 
fleets of country boats and bathing natives, then be- 
tween low banks punctuated with red and grey temples, 
bordered with an unbroken fringe of trees, out of 
which palms lift their heads daintily. Reach after 
reach, till the thickets part and you see long stretches 
of grass; you pull up at a stage wherefrom leads a 
path that is a tunnel of green. At the end you are in 
an English garden and park translated into India. 
Broad drives cleave through undulating lawns. The 
undulations are artificial, for drainage ; but at this 
rainless season the grass is grey. Yet the bushes and 
creepers blossom opulently into blue and purple and 
scarlet. This is a botanical garden in itself, with 
banyan and dusty-seeded teak and pipul spreading like 
a pyramid. There are scores- of other trees with 
botanical names, bright green and black, brown and 
red — trees swayed by the wind into bows, trees shoot- 
ing bolt upright or drooping to earth, symmetrical or 
gadding in feathery tumult. Between them you catch 
vistas of the blue-bosomed Hughli, dotted with bam- 
boo boat-cottages, embroidered with palms and pa- 
godas. This is Barrackpur; but besides Barrackpur 
there are half-a-dozen suburbs, and the merchant keeps 

68 



Calcutta 

\ 

his steam-launch as in Finchley or Merton he used to 
keep his carriage. 

Yet the life of Calcutta, the thirty-five-years' resi- 
dent will tell you, is not what it was. In the old pic- 
tures you see Chowringhee, the great street along the 
Maidan, a range of pillared bungalows ; now much of 
it is red brick, stores, hotels, boarding-houses. In 
the pictures the sahib drives in a chariot, often with 
four horses; now he uses a victoria or a dogcart. 
Comfort, groan the elder men, is dying out of Cal- 
cutta. In the sixties, when it took four months to 
come out, men found it worth while to settle down in 
India and make it their home. Now it is very rare to 
find a man who has been ten years on end in the 
country ; though in Calcutta and among the planters 
of Behar and Assam you will still find some who 
have not seen home for fifteen and twenty years. But 
now, as a rule, a man goes home after five years and 
marries; after ten years his children go home; his 
wife goes to see them every other year or so. Life is 
dislocated. Nobody is quite sure whether he lives in 
India or Europe, and is at home in neither. Among 
the merchants — the legitimate, if not the lineal, heirs 
of the "gentlemen at Fort William," and still the 
backbone of Calcutta — there will be, say, three part- 
ners, of whom one is always spending a year at home. 
Or else the senior members live at home altogether 
and send junior assistants to India, to the detriment 
of British trade. 

69 



Calcutta 

And yet, though croakers croak, trade in Calcutta 
is still a great and imposing business. If in cotton 
its ten mills cannot compare with Bombay's hundred 
and more, it has a monopoly of jute-spinning, and 
over a score of tall chimneys smirch the lucid Indian 
air. For every kind of retail trade it is the finest 
centre in India : it has the largest white population 
among the cities, and it is the emporium for the 
largest white country populations — the indigo and tea 
planters of Behar and Darjiling and Assam. And of 
late years Calcutta's trade has received a powerful im- 
pulse from the development of the Bengal coal-fields. 
The mines are mostly within a hundred and fifty 
miles west and north-west of Calcutta; the produc- 
tion has leaped in twenty years from 957,000 tons to 
3,142,000; the exportation in ten years from 300 
tons to 136,000. As steam coal it may not be so 
good as the Cardiff stuff: nothing is. It makes much 
more ash ; but then, east of Suez, it is very much 
cheaper. When you can buy it in Colombo at 22s. 
a ton, and have to pay 29s. for Cardiff coal, the ex- 
pense of an extra hand or two in a stoke-hold is a 
small matter. 

If you want to be convinced that Calcutta is first 
of all a city of business, you need only look at its 
river and docks. On any day, at any hour, the 
Hughli carries a traffic that would not disgrace the 
Pool of London. Here is the British India Com- 
pany, with a fleet of over a hundred steamers, along- 

70 



Calcutta 

side of the boat with which every Bengal peasant goes 
to market as the London tradesman goes with his cart. 
Up and down they ply — narrow open canoes with a 
tiny deck-house, Indian gondolas ; or fat barges, as 
broad as they are long, built all over with bamboo 
into floating cottages, a platform above the roof for 
the captain, and a post and rail to fence the cargo. 

The bigger ships lie three and four deep along the 
shore, liners and tramps, and especially sailing-ships. 
You wondered why you never see the big, full-rigged 
ships and four-masted barks about the sea or in ports 
of call ; the reason seems to be that they are all in 
the Hughli. Here is the " Somali " of Liverpool, the 
biggest British sailing-ship, and here is the broadest- 
beamed boat in the world, who twice tore her own 
masts out by the weight of her cargo. By the side 
of the new boats with their high freeboard, the long, 
low-waisted ships of older date look like toys — but 
toys of what beauty ! Their spars and tackle are like 
a web of gossamer, and their hulls, black and white, 
grey or green, sit down to the caressing water as a 
swan sits. 

You can travel ten or twelve miles on a trolley 
round the wharfs and docks of Calcutta. Here are 
ships coaling or loading by basket, which is cheaper 
than machinery ; here a steamer coming into dry 
dock to be cleaned ; a dumpy-masted Dutch boat, her 
decks mere mounds of coal, filling up for Sumatra ; a 
tank-ship waiting for a job ; a British India boat tied 

71 



Calcutta 

up by the cat's cradle of railway siding, discharging a 
cargo from Mombasa. And among them all crawl 
dredgers and barges of grey mud, and the docks are 
checkered with brick-fields, for the port is ever in- 
creasing. 

Labour is not extraordinarily cheap — a good coal- 
coolie makes a rupee a-day, or eight shillings a-week ; 
which is only a couple of shillings less than some 
English country labourers — but it is abundant. For 
Calcutta is stuffed with people as a pod with peas. 

You have only to look at the map. In most maps 
of cities the ground represents open space and the 
blots on it houses ; in Calcutta the ground is all 
dwellings with little squares of open space dotted 
over it. You can twist and turn for hours in pas- 
sages that rub each elbow as you walk through them. 
In some places you have to go sidewise and edge 
along thoroughfares like a crab, so narrow are they. 
The rest is dwelling-place, pigsty, cesspool, or what- 
ever you like to call it. 

The workshops are smoke-black sheds, and the 
workers sit with just room between them to half-use 
their arms. Other shops are all counter ; the keeper 
squats on his heels among his groceries, and sleeps 
among them at night. Many huts are built of bam- 
boo-matting stretched on poles, or of transparent wat- 
tle-work ; but these are clean and wholesome com- 
pared with festering lanes in which people sleep and 
breed and sicken, because there is no room in the dens. 

72 



Calcutta 

These people are of a new type to the stranger 
coming in from the North-West. The Bengali is of 
a yellow-brown complexion ; his face shows quick in- 
telligence, but his eye is shifty. He goes, as a rule, 
bare-headed, his black hair carefully parted and oiled 
down. His dress is a white calico garment looped 
into loose drawers ; above it, in the cold weather, he 
wears a woollen plaid, generally brown, draped round 
his shoulders, or drawn over his head and mouth. 
Also, if he is any way prosperous, he wears ribbed 
woollen stockings or socks fastened up with garters or 
suspenders. Black is the usual colour, but I have 
seen sky-blue gartered with sea-green ; with a glimpse 
of fat brown thigh between the stocking and the 
drawers, it is, on the whole, the most indecent dress I 
know. 

But by his legs you shall know the Bengali. The 
leg of a free man is straight or a little bandy, so that 
he can stand on it solidly : his calf is taper and his 
thigh flat. The Bengali's leg is either skin and bone, 
the same size all the way down, with knocking knobs 
for knees, or else it is very fat and globular, also turn- 
ing in at the knees, with round thighs like a woman's. 
The Bengali's leg is the leg of a slave. 

Except by grace of his natural masters, a slave he 
always has been and always must be. He has the 
virtues of the slave and his vices, — strong family 
affections, industry, frugality, a trick of sticking to 
what he wants until he wears you down, a quick imi- 

73 



Calcutta 

tative intelligence and amazing verbal cleverness ; 
dishonesty, suspiciousness, lack of initiative, coward- 
ice, ingratitude, utter incapacity for any sort of chiv- 
alry. 

But his chief and marvellous trait is his abundance. 
Calcutta and Bengal breed, and breed, and breed. 
Stand on the Hughli bridge at sunset — on the east 
side, the factory-smoke lying in a sullen bank under 
the glowing scarlet ; on the west, the cornfield of 
masts, and the funnel-smoke and the city-smoke foul- 
ing the ineffable stillness of Indian evening; a free 
space of blue overhead, so clear and soft and pure 
that it seems no longer the canopy of the world, but 
the embosoming infinity it really is ; and the Bengalis 
crossing the bridge. On one side going in to Cal- 
cutta, on the other coming out, an endless drove of 
moving, white-clothed people, never varying in thick- 
ness, never varying in pace, never stopping, no inter- 
val, just moving, moving, like an endless belt running 
on a wheel. Just population : that is Bengal. Food 
for census, food for census ! 



74 



IX 
ON NATIVE SELF-GOVERNMENT 

It is generally supposed in Great Britain that India 
is governed wholly by our countrymen. Of the few 
people at home who profess to know anything about 
India, most encourage this delusion. The native, 
they will tell you, has no word in any afFair of gov- 
ernment — unless you count the annual shriek set up 
by a collection of half-Europeanised lawyers which, 
belonging to a dozen different breeds and representing 
none, calls itself the National Congress. The truth, 
as you might expect in this land of ironies, is widely 
different. In practice, as we shall see presently, the 
actual work of government is almost entirely in native 
hands, and largely conducted according to native 
methods ; and in theory the government of almost 
every considerable town in India is in the hands of a 
municipal council, the majority of whose members 
are inevitably native. There are about seven hundred 
and fifty municipalities in India, which is more than 
twice as many as there are in England and Wales. 
There is also a district board — a kind of rural County 
Council — in each administrative district in India. 

It was a generous ideal, the qualification of India 

75 



On Native Self-Government 

by Britain for self-government; but unluckily, like 
other ideals, it has not yet achieved itself. The 
machinery of self-government is there, but the capac- 
ity has not kept up with it. In the smaller town 
councils and the district councils self-government is 
no more than a name. The civil servant is chair- 
man : he announces the business in hand — the repair- 
ing of a road, the imposition of an octroi on goods 
brought into the town — and makes a suggestion. 
The honourable members fold their hands before their 
faces and murmur, "As my lord says, so let it be." 
The native members feel it a vague compliment to be 
allowed to sit with the sahibs, but yet understand 
nothing at all of the business. The official sahibs are 
obliged by the law to keep up the farce of constitu- 
tional discussion and voting, though they well know 
that the council is only a more cumbrous way of doing 
work that they would have to do in any case. 

The larger municipalities are different. There may 
be an official white chairman, but the councils are 
large, and they deal with large revenues and important 
business. By them you may fairly test the aptitude 
of the more intelligent, though less manly, races of 
India for self-government. It so happened, at the 
time of my visit, that two of these were prominently 
in the public eye — if you can talk of a public eye in 
India — as the objects of reformatory measures. 
These were Calcutta and Agra. Of Agra there is no 
need to say much : the council, to put it brutally, had 

76 



On Native Self-Government 

been stealing the octroi duties, and it was temporarily 
disestablished by the Lieutenant-Governor of the 
North-West Provinces. On the Calcutta question 
there vi^as more to be said — it even enjoyed a listless 
afternoon in the House of Commons; and it may 
fairly be taken as a convenient object-lesson in the 
aptitudes and tendencies of legislation by babu. 

The history of municipal self-government in 
Calcutta is impartially discreditable to everybody 
concerned in it. Up to 1876 it had passed through 
some half-dozen incarnations, which need not trouble 
us ; none worked well, and some did not work at all. 
In that year an elective municipality was created, 
and its constitution was modified in 1888. On the 
universal admission of all authorities, the two Acts 
creating this municipality are badly drawn, vague, 
and inevitably productive of bad administration ; but 
for twenty years neither the Bengal Government nor 
the elective corporation took the least trouble to im- 
prove them. Neglect finally issued, as might have 
been predicted, in violent corrective action on the 
part of the Government, and in factious and hysterical 
opposition from the native municipality. 

The Corporation of Calcutta consists of seventy- 
five members, called Commissioners. Fifty are 
elected, fifteen nominated by Government, and ten 
by the various commercial bodies. The franchise is 
confined to ratepayers, who total just two per cent, 
of the whole population of. Calcutta. The Chair- 

11 



On Native Self-Government 

man is a member of the Indian Civil Service, nomi- 
nated by Government. He is supposed to be the 
head of the executive, but, as a matter of fact, is 
liable to the control of a general committee, of eight 
standing committees, and of the general meeting of all 
the Commissioners, who can upset any of his actions 
with retrospective effect : consequently the executive 
power is in the hands of the whole body of seventy- 
five Commissioners. Of these, fifty-two per cent, 
are Hindus, nearly eighteen per cent. Mussulmans, 
and the remaining thirty per cent, of other sections. 
Less than twenty-seven per cent, are Europeans or 
Eurasians. Of the fifty elected Commissioners, 
twenty-three are lawyers. The municipality, there- 
fore, deliberative and executive together, is wholly in 
the hands of a working majority of Bengali Hindus. 

It was duly set up, however, amid the plaudits of 
the friends of progress, and all went ill till November 
26, 1896. On that day the municipality was in- 
augurating new drainage works, and asked the Lieu- 
tenant-Governor of Bengal, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, 
to lay the foundation-stone. He complied ; but when 
it came to his speech, instead of the oily platitudes 
awaited on such occasions, the horrified Commission- 
ers found themselves listening to a round denuncia- 
tion of themselves and all their works — or want of 
them. They were an impracticable organisation from 
the first, said his Honour ; they talked too much ; 
their executive was too weak; the sanitary condition 

78 



On Native Self-Government 

of Calcutta was a scandal ; and if they did not mend 
their ways there would come radical changes. 

They gasped ; but they did not mend their ways. 
On March 19, 1898, when anew Calcutta Municipal 
Bill was introduced into the Lieutenant-Governor's 
Council, they gasped yet more. As a leading organ 
of babu opinion puts it, " Nobody could ever dream 
that the citizens of the first city in India could be 
sought to be punished in this cruel manner by a ruler 
whom they had in no way offended, and whom they 
had given such a hearty welcome." You will note 
the delicious blend of Western citizenship with the 
oriental assumption that unpopular action on a ruler's 
part might naturally be due to a defect of enthusi- 
asm in his reception. But in truth the self-govern- 
ing babu had grounds for his consternation. 

The Bill, after the kind of Indian official docu- 
ments, is a volume of the size of a small ledger, and 
contains — again I quote the babu contemporary — 
" seven hundred sections, many of them one cubit 
long." Briefly, it remodelled the whole constitution 
of the Corporation. The Chairman was to have full 
power over the executive officers ; and the conduct of 
all important business except the Budget — which was 
left to the whole body of Commissioners — was trans- 
ferred to a general committee of twelve members ; of 
these the Government, the commercial bodies, and the 
elected Commissioners were each to choose four. 

" Could a greater calamity than this be con- 

79 



On Native S elf-Government 

ceived ? " cries the native newspaper. " Now, at 
last, we shall have a city it will be possible to live in," 
said the European men of business. The controversy 
went fiercely on, and so did the Bill. Pamphlets, 
leaflets, refutations, counter-accusations, speeches, and 
rejoinders hurtled through Calcutta. 

The first reflection that occurs to the impartial 
mind, on the Calcutta Bill in particular and native 
self-government in general, is that it was a colossal 
and unpardonable blunder to introduce an elective 
municipality at all. Representative government, a 
Western invention, has failed in most nations of 
the West : was it likely to succeed in India ? India 
may be barbarous or civilised, — that is a question of 
words ; but, for all the veneer of education, it is 
changelessly, whole-heartedly oriental. When you 
find a Master of Arts gravely dissertating on " a pure 
and noble character gradually degraded by an un- 
healthy passion for a beautiful young widow," what is 
the use of talking to him about sanitation or a General 
Purposes Committee ? He catches up his phrases 
readily enough, and talks rapidly about the " slight 
measure of self-government," and of " strengthening 
the executive at the expense of the rights of the 
people." But, of course, the people has no right to 
self-government, and never has had ; and the huge 
mass of it does not want any, and the Indian and 
Home Governments were incredibly weak and foolish 
to give any. They should have known, what the 

80 



On Native Self-Government 

babu cannot be expected to understand, that the right 
to govern yourself should be exactly proportioned to 
your ability to govern yourself well. 

Moreover, " the rights of the people " in this case 
means next to nothing — merely the rights of the one 
man out of fifty in Calcutta who has a vote. In 
seventy-three cases out of a hundred this voter is a 
Hindu. What Government really did then, in 
making two-thirds of the Commissioners elective, 
was to hand over the city to the Hindus. Numeric- 
ally these form the vast majority of the popu- 
lation of Calcutta, but they have not the same 
vast preponderance of interest. It is the 
commercial community — European, Eurasian, Jew, 
Parsi, but not Bengali; for the Bengali will 
never trust his money in another man's hands — 
which has made Calcutta a great city, and maintains 
it such. The trade of Calcutta is responsible for 
three-fourths of its land value and two-thirds of its 
population. If it were not the centre of the largest 
European population in India, it would cease to be the 
winter capital to-morrow. For above all — why not 
speak plainly ? — the principal interest in Calcutta is 
the interest of British rule. The present municipal 
administration sacrifices the interests of trade and 
government, with others, to a single important, but 
far from all-important, section. On the balance of 
factors in the city's wellbeing, the Hindu is vastly 
over-represented. 

8i 



On Native Self-Govemment 

But let us get out of the bog of theory. What is 
the Corporation's record, and how is the new scheme 
likely to better it ? These are the only relevant 
questions ; and the answer to the first is that the Cor- 
poration's record is exactly what you would have ex- 
pected of it. It is absurd to expect the native to be 
born administrator, but it is equally absurd to blame 
him for not being one. How should he be ? In the 
course of struggles towards the native point of view, 
I interviewed one of the Commissioners — a plump, 
round-faced, gold-spectacled gentleman in a clerical 
coat, waistcoat, and trousers of dove-colour. He led 
ofF briskly with facts and figures, until he found I 
knew something of the Bill. The initial form of the 
dialogue, which it would be unprofitable to report in 
full, was something like this : — 

Baku. " And-now-the-pro-pos-al-is-that-we-should- 
meet-only-once-a-year-which-re-du-ces-us-to " 

/. « How often ? " 

Babu. " Four - times - but -I -was - con-sid-er-ing-it- 
from-the-bud-get-point-of-view-and " 

1, " How often do you have budgets now, then ? " 

Babu. " Well - on - ly- once -an-nu-al-ly-of-course- 
but - our - re-ve-nue-is-on-ly-from-land-and-house-tax- 
where-as-in-Bombay " 

/. " Only land and house tax ? " 

Babu. " Well-of-course-there-is-al-so-the-car-riage- 
tax - and - the - an - i - mal - tax - and - the -li-cence-tax- 

but " 

82 



On Native Self-Government 

However, my friend's chief point, when he came 
to it, was one in which many good white authorities 
agree with him. How could you expect us to do 
perfectly, he said, when we entered on municipal life 
utterly without training or experience, when Govern- 
ment let us severely alone and did nothing to help and 
instruct us ? How, indeed ? Only what the Com- 
missioner did not see was that his argument could be 
used as a condemnation of the elective system alto- 
gether; for why elect Commissioners if Government 
still has to do their work for them ? 

But the Government, whether of Britain, of India, 
or of Bengal, cannot use that argument ; for it created 
representative government and then wholly neglected 
to use its power to direct it in the right way. In 
England corporations have the Local Government 
Board to keep them straight, and need it. In Cal- 
cutta Government could have made by-laws, amended 
the law where it was defective, instituted inquiries 
into abuses, suggested reforms, rewarded good Com- 
missioners with titles or decorations, and especially 
set up proper judicial establishments to enforce the 
sanitary laws. Instead, it left the Commissioners to 
stew in their own juice — and they left the slums of 
Calcutta to stew in theirs. 

If you care to go a little into the details of the case 
for and against the present Corporation of Calcutta, 
there is no need to enlarge except on two principal 
points. The question whether the Commissioners 

83 



On Native Self-Government 

talk too much came much into the discussion, but 
after all it is a minor one. They say they do not ; 
others say that if you are outside the door during one 
of their meetings you would think they were tearing 
the Chairman to pieces. Britons and Bengalis have 
different standards of the necessity for talk. " You 
have drunk too much fire-water," said the missionary 
to the Indian chief. " I have drunk enough," he re- 
plied. " You have drunk too much." " Well, too 
much is enough," said the chief: and it is so with the 
Bengali and talking. 

My babu's contention seems reasonable enough. 
People think the Commissioners are always talking, 
said he, only because the long debates are reported, 
while the undiscussed business is not ; the same mis- 
apprehension exists about our own L.C.C. The 
relevant question is. Talk or not, do they do the 
work ? 

On the whole, with every effort to be fair, I should 
say that they do not. It is partly their own fault, but 
more the Act's, and most of all native self-govern- 
ment's at large. If you take a number of super- 
ficially educated Bengalis of the middle class, dignify 
them with the title of Commissioners, and give them 
the control of a vast city, it is certain that they will 
grow a little above themselves. They will want to 
have their fingers in every pie, and the Calcutta Act 
makes this particularly easy. In Bombay the execu- 
tive, under the official Chairman, is almost independ- 

84 



On Native Self-Government 

ent of the deliberative body ; in Calcutta It is wholly 
subordinate. 

This is a risky arrangement, even in London ; in 
India it is foredoomed to disaster. The Corporation 
has grown much too strong for its Chairman. Of late 
the Chairmen have been frequently changed, often 
before they had settled into their work. To match 
your wits for four hours on end, in the hot weather, 
at the end of a long day's work, against anything 
from a dozen to half a hundred fluent and verbally 
ingenious Bengalis, is trying to the hardest man : 
some were ripe for furlough when they began it — all 
became over-ripe after a season of it. It has been 
comparatively easy, therefore, for the Commissioners 
to concentrate all power in their own hands. To 
make it easier yet they hit on an ingenious device, 
called the Complaints Committee. It was customary 
two years ago to have enormous standing committees ; 
one had forty-eight members out of the seventy-five, 
and this Complaints Committee had thirty-three. It 
was formed to receive complaints against the executive 
officers of the Corporation. The native is always 
burning to petition somebody about something, and 
complaints came in a turbid spate. They arrived at 
the rate of twenty a-day, and a single one took a fort- 
night to dispose of. By the end of a year, at this 
rate, there would be 7274 of them awaiting attention. 
So it was settled that the Committee should only con- 
sider complaints referred to it by the Chairman or a 

85 



On Native Self-Government 

Commissioner. Who now so important as the Com- 
missioner ? Who so prosperous as the half-dozen or 
so dishonest men among them ? The native they 
quarrelled with had to wait eighteen months for per- 
mission to put up a latrine ; the relative or the friend 
or the man with a little money to lay out in the right 
quarter was able to evade the building acts and increase 
his rent-rolls. 

With a system like this it would be folly to look 
for good executive administration. The constitution, 
it has been said, is all brake-power and no engine. 
There is no motive power. The Chairman can be 
overruled and his action annulled. The committees 
are jealously watching, checking, economising. As 
for the subordinate officials — the engineer, surveyor, 
health officer, down to the very inspector of nuisances 
— they hold their offices at the pleasure of the Com- 
missioners at large, and owe their appointments to 
them. A Hindu lives with all his relations under 
one roof, and nepotism with him is almost a religious 
duty ; hence unblushing solicitation, touting, and oc- 
casionally bribery. A bad officer can get his post if 
he is agreeable to the Commissioners; a good one 
can lose it if he offends them or any of their relations. 

Considering all this, it is wonderful that the munic- 
ipality has done even as much as it has. It is not 
denied that the Commissioners have made some halt- 
ing progress. Their credit is good, and they have 
reduced their rate of interest in seven years from five 

86 



On Native Self-Government 

to three and one-half per cent. ; loans have been ten- 
dered for five and six times over. They have cut 
Harrison Road from the Hughli Bridge eastward 
through some of the worst slums of Calcutta — a 
broad avenue nearly five miles long, garnished with 
trees, established with tall, well-built, and airy houses, 
— here the long wooden verandahs of tenement- 
houses rising over lines of shops, there brick or stone 
places of business. It is a street to which any city 
might point proudly. But it is an isolated case, and 
my babu Commissioner's own figures condemn him. 
He produced tables which showed — deducting subur- 
ban expenditure, which only came into the municipal- 
ity's functions in 1889 — that his council had spent 
proportionately less in the improvement and sanitation 
of Calcutta than did the Justices of the Peace who 
administered it before their time. He excused this 
by explaining that the resources of the Corporation 
were very limited ; but the damning fact remains that 
it has not raised as much revenue as it is entitled to 
do. Its Act allows a rate of twenty-three per cent., 
which is very low compared with our rates at home ; 
for the last seven years it has only raised nineteen and 
one-half per cent. — and that although the value of 
land in Calcutta is very high and the profits of owners 
prodigious. In some parts of the city land is worth 
;^40,ooo an acre, and the most valuable plots are pre- 
cisely those which are covered with flimsy hovels 
crawling with naked humanity. 

87 



On Native Self-Government 

For, after all, in sanitary matters, you must judge 
authority not by what it has done, but by what it has 
left undone ; and on this showing the verdict must be 
black against native self-government. Calcutta is a 
shame even to the East. In its slums dock-coolies 
and mill-hands do not live : they pig. Houses choke 
with unwholesome breath; drains and compounds 
fester in filth. Wheels compress decaying refuse into 
roads. Cows drink from wells soaked with sewage, 
and the flour of bakeries is washed in the same pollu- 
tion. 

What wonder that the death-rate of the whole city 
is thirty-six in the thousand — in one ward, forty-eight 
in the thousand ? The deaths that might be prevented 
by decent cleanliness are reckoned at more than one 
in every three. It is a miracle that plague struck 
Calcutta as lightly as it did ; for its state is an invita- 
tion to pestilence and a menace to the world. So far 
it has escaped by sheer luck ; next year or the next 
we may hear of thousands on thousands of victims. 
You cannot be astonished at anything when the Com- 
missioners — who had known of all these things for 
twenty years — though they formed committees and 
established hospitals with exemplary zeal, formed vigi- 
lance committees to notify cases of disease which did 
nothing at all. 

Why ? Because the B. A. is still an Oriental : 
either in his heart he hates sanitary regulations as 
fervently as the sweeper, or he is afraid of the sweep- 

88 



On Native Self-Government 

er's anger if he enforces them. He wants to combine 
Western representative government with Eastern dirt, 
Herbert Spencer with the laws of Manu — to eat his 
cake and have it. " My nephew," lamented a native 
lady, " will be the ruin of us all. I am a widow with 
young children, yet he must needs join a vigilance 
committee. He will be knocked on the head and we 
shall all come to ruin ; why must he interfere with 
other people's business ? " 

The truth is that we have made a capital error with 
the Bengali — capital in any case, fatal with him. We 
have instructed, but not educated, him. We have 
taught him from books instead of facts, taught him 
the words of civilisation and not the things. We 
have therefore failed with him, as we deserved. 



89 



X 

THE HIGHER EDUCATION 

It is hard to determine who is the more unfortunate man here — 
a man who has a marriageable daughter, but cannot provide for 
her marriage, or a man who has a son who has failed to pass an 
examination. Take the case of the latter first. He starves him- 
self to provide for the education of his son. The son, let us sup- 
pose, does his best to pass an examination — most boys do so in this 
country. But it happens that he falls ill on the first day of his ex- 
amination. He must thus wait another year. The subjects of his 
study disgust him, for he had once gone through them. He ap- 
pears at another examination, but unluckily a sudden dizziness 
seizes him one day while writing his answers; he fails to recollect 
something with which he was quite familiar, and again fails in the 
examination. When the news is brought to him that he has failed, 
he falls down in a swoon — or something worse happens to him. 
The blow makes him something like an idiot for life. If his un- 
thinking parent chastises him after this, he purchases four pice 
worth of opium and kills himself. What is a failed candidate ? 
He is a doomed man ! He is as doomed as a life-convict. Night- 
keeping and hard study had destroyed his health. Luckily he 
does not live long. A failed candidate, generally speaking, does 
not survive his disgrace. He dies either of consumption or of in- 
digestion. He knows he is not wanted in society. If he has evil 
propensities, he becomes a dangerous member of society. But, 
luckily, youths belonging to those classes who compete for univer- 
sity honours seldom carry with them any criminal proclivities. 

No ; you are not dreaming. This is an exact tran- 

90 



The Higher Education 

script of a leading article which lately appeared in one 
of the most influential of the native newspapers in 
Calcutta. I give you my word it did. 

Having read it, you can begin to form some idea of 
that wonder of nature, the babu ; or, at least, you can 
begin to perceive how impossible it is to form any 
sane idea of a wonder so unnatural. This extract is 
the babu displayed, complete and essential. I suppose 
there is nothing like it in the world — thousands of 
people, speaking and writing an alien tongue almost as 
if it were their own, yet thinking and feeling a whole 
world apart from the spirit of it. This grotesque 
prodigy is the fine flower of the system of education 
which we, with infinite care, have grafted on to the 
Indian intelligence. 

When we began to organise the higher education of 
India, it was decided, mainly on the impulse of 
Macaulay, that it should be founded on an English 
basis. The ancient languages and the ancient phi- 
losophies of India were depressed into a secondary 
place : in the five universities we have set up in Bom- 
bay, Calcutta, Madras, Allahabad, and Lahore, San- 
skrit or Pali stands on much the same footing as Latin 
or Greek, with which India has plainly but the remot- 
est concern. Examinations, whether in high schools 
or in universities, are conducted in English : English 
literature, English mental and moral philosophy, Eng- 
lish systems of mathematics, English methods of 
science, are the highroads to a degree. The educated 

91 



The Higher Education 

native is to be intellectually indistinguishable from the 
educated Briton. 

On the surface this experiment has been astonish- 
ingly successful. In Bengal, and to a great extent in 
Madras and Bombay, the native took to European 
education as a duck to vi^ater. It is true that he never 
learned to talk or write exactly like an Englishman — 
his speech and style have always an exotic flavour; 
yet the numbers who learned to speak, read, and write 
fluently, and who passed fairly difficult examinations 
in a foreign tongue, testify to an application and an 
elastic intelligence which you will hardly parallel else- 
where in the world. Thousands matriculate in the 
universities yearly ; more than a thousand take de- 
grees. The experiment seems triumphant ; and none, 
naturally, triumph louder than the natives themselves. 
"We fully admit," writes the organ I have quoted 
above, " that the Englishman is very intelligent and 
shrewd ; but we also contend that the Indian " — 
meaning the Bengali — " is fully his peer." Or, an- 
other day, " It must be borne in mind that the Indian 
populace are more intelligent than a London popu- 
lace." Ten minutes in a native village are enough to 
establish the imbecility of this last proposition ; yet 
on paper it would seem to be true. 

Unfortunately the whole system of higher educa- 
tion in India is radically vicious in plan, and, if not 
actually disastrous, at least almost profitless in effect. 
It is organised solely with a view to results on paper. 

92 



The Higher Education 

The universities have been modelled on that of 
London, which is probably the worst in the world. 
They do not teach, but only examine. Not merely 
that J they only examine on set subjects and on set 
books. The candidate must not be expected to know 
anything outside his cram-books. Such an examina- 
tion can never be any real test of capacity or even of 
knowledge, but only of memory — a useful gift, but no 
more: of real education it furnishes no criterion 
whatever. The consequence is that, in Calcutta at 
least, a man of fair but not extraordinary intelligence, 
but of powerful memory, can attain to his B.A. degree 
by simple, ignoble learning by rote. An analysis of 
the examination papers shows that a native, if he will 
take the trouble to learn by heart the introductions 
and notes to his books of English literature, the texts 
of his books on psychology and ethics, the introduc- 
tions to his Latin books and Bohn's translation of the 
same, can write himself B.A. without the feeblest 
approach to anything that could be called a thought 
of his own. 

That, you say, must be a very bad examination; 
but you can hardly believe that anybody would have 
the memory or the application to perform such a feat. 
You are wrong: it is actually done, or as near as 
makes no difference. A few years ago, at Calcutta, 
a candidate for the degree of M.A. took up Latin. 
His translations were literally flawless. Only the 
examiner noticed that in every case he began his 

93 



The Higher Education 

rendering a few lines before the passage which was 
printed on the paper given him and finished a few 
lines later. He had learned the crib by heart, fixing 
his places by proper names, or, when these were 
scarce, by some mnemonic arrangement of his own 
— and there he was ! After all, the same thing has 
been done at Oxford and Cambridge. Many of us 
used to know whole books of Virgil and Horace by 
heart in Latin j why should not a Bengali, speaking 
English and with a direct pecuniary interest in the 
business, be able to learn them in English ? 

The examiner in this case reported that his man 
had failed, whereon the candidate appealed to the 
governing body. This was mainly composed of na- 
tives, who, having the interests of education — that is, 
of getting degrees — at heart, insisted on the man being 
allowed to pass in Latin, though, on his own admis- 
sion, he hardly knew a word of the language. For the 
bad system is made worse by the fact that the uni- 
versities have been allowed to come under native 
management, which means laxity and utter careless- 
ness about true education. There used to be a viva 
voce examination at Bombay, and, as I learn from a 
gentleman who had much experience of it, its dis- 
closures were sufficiently amusing. "You say in 
your papers here," he would say to the examinee, 
"that Sir Walter Scott is a most beautiful writer. 
Now here are his works : pick out your favourite.*' 
Whereon the examinee would turn green, for this was 

94 



The Higher Education 

the first time he had ever set eyes on so much as the 
covers of the works of that beautiful writer Scott. 
But the natives abolish this part of the examination ; 
and in general they are always tending to lower the 
standard. 

It is true that the standard, especially of Bombay, 
is still fairly high — about that of London, and con- 
siderably above that of the pass-man at Oxford or 
Cambridge. But as it is all a matter of rote, it mat- 
ters little what the theoretical standard may be. The 
candidate has a direct pecuniary interest in passing, 
and no labour will stop him. In the first place, there 
is Government service. The various Secretariats ab- 
sorb a vast number of graduates as clerks, and though 
the general influence of the clerk on Government is 
here, as everywhere, most pernicious, they make very 
good clerks indeed. But then, there are not nearly 
enough clerkships to go round. The calendar of the 
University of Calcutta shows over five thousand of 
B.A.'s alone — a couple of batches of three to four 
hundred apiece, by the way, named Bandyopadhyay 
and Mukhopadhyay respectively. Those who get 
into the public service are established for life ; but 
the others feel that they have been ill-used. They 
have not yet got clear of the idea — so skin-deep is 
their Europeanising — that to have a degree is in itself 
a passport to public employment. How should they, 
when even to have failed in an examination is re- 
garded as giving a claim to a salary ? It sounds like 

95 



The Higher Education 

comic opera; but I know many men who have had 
natives again and again appeal for posts with the sole 
qualification that they have failed in a university 
examination. Consumption and indigestion spare 
them somehow, and now failure is almost a degree in 
itself. "F. M., Calcutta" — Failed in Matriculation 
— may shortly be expected to appear on the babu's 
card. 

The surplus Bandyopadhyays, for whom Govern- 
ment finds no room, go to reinforce the native press. 
They are discontented ; they have their grievance, — 
though, mark you, they have been educated at the 
public expense — at the expense, that is, of the ryot, — 
and consequently the native press is steadily dis- 
affected. Most of it professes loyalty, but it never 
misses a chance of carping at the Government, or at 
white men in general. So far, then, as the native 
press is a danger, it is one which, by the usual irony 
of India, we have created for ourselves in a sincere 
attempt to benefit the native. I fancy, for myself, 
that the Anglo-Indian official is apt to be a little 
nervous about the native press, and by taking notice 
of it to feed the vanity on which it lives. It is im- 
pertinent, certainly, often wilfully inaccurate, and 
sometimes, in the vernacular, filthily scurrilous ; but 
the best way to deal with it is probably to do nothing. 
Let disloyalty talk and write as it will ; after all, why 
should a native of India be loyal to Britain ? But the 
moment it begins to act, shoot and spare not. 

96 



The Higher Education 

Much better to enjoy quietly the unfailing deli- 
ciousness of the native press. There is, for instance, a 
monthly review called " The National Magazine," 
which never fails to please. Its tone is consistently 
moral, sensible, and dignified, but occasionally its 
English flowers a little luxuriantly. " It was some 
time before I could extricate him," writes an expert 
bicycle-rider of a pupil, " when, lo ! a very much 
bruised and sprained-ankle man was he." Or here 
is a description of a young man's first step in vice. 
" He heard the soft, delicious, soul-abandoning sounds 
of music, and saw the youthful nautch-girls, robed in 
voluptuous dress, come and seat before him, while 
the distribution of garlands of jasmine and sprinkling 
of rose-water lent what is generally termed a double 
arrow to the Cupid's bow." A local correspondent 
of a daily paper is happily inspired when he says that 
some of the officials " are in the jungle with gun in 
the jolly time of Xmas joy." But perhaps obituaries 
offer most facility for elegance of composition. One 
organ says of a pleader — and remember that nearly all 
the prominent babus follow this trade — " his child- 
like simplicity fascinated all, and was proof against 
the demoraUsing influences of his honourable pro- 
fession." Another gentleman " was a man of un- 
common sense, devoted to God all along his life." 
By the death of a patron he " was compelled to live 
in his nativity at Somsa. . . . The deceased was 
the gem hidden at Somsa, quite unknown to many, 

97 



The Higher Education 

but known to almost all the Pundits of Bengal. His 
death has made this part of the country dark as it 
were." Finally, lest you think there may be exagger- 
ation in stories of babu English, take this extract 
from an appreciation of certain orators of the native 
Congress. The subject is a gentleman called Pundit 
Madan Mohan Malavayya. 

His speech is as mellifluous as his naine. He has a sweet voice, 
and is one of the most enthusiastically welcomed of men on the 
Congress platform. Neither tall nor short, not stout but thin, not 
dark, dressed in pure white, with a white robe which goes round 
his shoulders and ends down below the knees, Mr. Madan Mohan 
stands like Eiffel's Tower when he addresses his fellow-Congress- 
men. He stands slanting forward, admirably preserving his centre 
of gravity. His speeches are full of pellucid and sparkling state- 
ments, and his rolling and interminable sentences travel out of his 
mouth in quick succession, producing a thrilling impression on 
the audience. There is music in his voice ; there is magic 
in his eye ; and he is one of the sweet charmers of the Congress 
company. 

And now, do you know one more reason why the 
native seeks university distinctions ? The gentleman 
who learned the Bohn by heart was asked why he put 
himself to so much trouble. To raise his price in the 
marriage market, he serenely replied. He would get 
a wife with a larger dowry as M.A. than as B.A. ; how 
much larger than as F.M. or nothing .? If you do not 
believe me, listen to a writer in my " National Maga- 
zine," who himself deprecates the practice. "Let 
alone the boy," he says ; " his father of maturer years 

98 



The Higher Education 

will not be ashamed to demand from you cash to the 
tune of not less than 2000 rupees, if you will only 
ask him to marry your daughter to his son. And 
why so ? Only because the boy has obtained a 
certificate of matriculation from the university." It 
is sober truth : the fathers of daughters will pay 
heavily — and do — to purchase sons-in-law who have 
passed examinations. 

Did I say comic opera ? It is beyond farce ; it is 
beyond the games of the nursery. We have given 
India the treasures of our Shakespeare, our Bacon, 
our Huxley; and India uses them as convenient 
pegs wherefrom to hang quotations on the husband 
market ! 

O India, India ! What jests are perpetrated in thy 
name ! 



99 



XI 

THE MAHARAJAH BAHADUR 

The first time I met my friend the Maharajah, he 
was wearing his blue and green. An ultramarine 
satin tunic over grass-green silk trousers is a combi- 
nation which arrests the European eye at any time. 
In this case it enclosed a little wizen-faced man, with 
eyes now tending together, then flitting here and 
there with an abundance of white eyeball. Add a 
little jewelled satin cap, a drooping black moustache, 
and pointed yellow-leather shoes : with joyful recog- 
nition — Heaven forgive me — I cried, " An illustration 
of Aladdin ! " 

I repented of my irreverence later, for he is one of 
the greatest men in Bengal, which is little, and de- 
serves to be, which is much. He is the largest land- 
owner in the province, and his tax-free rent-roll 
comes to about a quarter of a million a-year. Else- 
where in India, you must understand, the State is 
usually the landlord, according to the immemorial 
custom of the land. But in Bengal, a hundred and 
six years ago, the Government made what is called 
the Permanent Settlement — giving over the land to 
zemindars, who, under the Mogul rule, had been 

100 



The Maharajah Bahadur 

hereditary land-agents and tax-collectors. Finding 
the zemindars collecting rent from the cultivators, it 
is possible that the Indian Government mistook them 
for landlords in the European sense ; at any rate, they 
were declared proprietors of the land, subject to a 
fixed yearly tax, which was never to vary. It never 
has varied ; in the meantime, the population of culti- 
vators has increased vastly, and their industry has 
reclaimed vast tracts of waste land. All this incre- 
ment has been swallowed by the zemindars, who have 
repaid the ryot in many cases by raising his rent and 
confiscating his land. The average zemindar does no 
public service in return for the vastly enhanced in- 
come which he owes to the security of our rule : he 
does not even pay income-tax, since in India income- 
tax and land-tax are never paid together : thus the 
Bengal zemindar escapes on both counts. On the 
other side the Government loses revenue which it 
would otherwise reasonably exact, and the ryot loses 
everything he has. It is encouraging, in the face of 
accusations of perfidy, that our Government in India 
prefers to struggle against deficits when it could easily 
put its Budget straight by breaking the promise of 
a century back — an expedient that any other Govern- 
ment there ever was or could be in India would have 
flown to long ago. 

The Maharajah is a zemindar among zemindars — 
the richest of them all — yet no true zemindar at 
heart. The ryots of his estate — until a few months 

lOI 



The Maharajah Bahadur 

back his brother's — instead of having the records of 
their rights suppressed and destroyed and their fields 
then let to a higher bidder, have found their land- 
lord always munificent in every public enterprise. 
The new Maharajah, to complete the inventory of 
him, has spent a couple of years in the Civil Service 
for the benefit of his mind, and a couple as a half- 
naked fakir for that of his soul, is a member of the 
Viceroy's Legislative Council, and a constant reader 
of the London newspapers. I mentioned this to a 
friend as almost incredible. " If he told you so," 
was the reply, " he does. He always tells the truth, 
and so did his brother. It's unusual in this country." 

To-day he was to be formally invested with the 
title of Maharajah Bahadur — which means " Lord- 
Great-King " — by the Lieutenant-Governor of Ben- 
gal. His village is comparatively near Calcutta, so 
that I only had to start the night before. I changed 
carriages, half-asleep, and the next thing I knew — 
the Ganges. 

The holy Ganges floated great and grey at my feet. 
Out of the blackness of the west it came naked into 
the muflled grey of dawn. Except the bare train that 
had brought me to the ghat and the bare steamer that 
was to carry me across, I could see nothing but chill 
yellow shore and sandbank and chill white water. A 
pilgrim issuing from some little shrine, where he had 
slept, shivered and shook knee-deep in the stream, 
and his soaked white drawers clung to him dankly. 

102 



The Maharajah Bahadur 

When you travel in small countries you generally find 
that you start and arrive at convenient hours — catch 
your train after a comfortable breakfast, and get to 
your destination in easy time for dinner. In a country 
of the size of India you must take your arrivals and 
changes as you find them. So that I found the palm- 
fringed, basking Ganges of my dreams to be a broad, 
noiseless, colourless flood, w^hich the red ball of the 
sun hardly awoke to more than the clammy lustre of 
a dead fish's eye. The seams of sandbank were pale 
with cold ; the shores were only sandbank prolonged 
to a greater capacity for numb desolation. 

But the sun climbed undiscouraged, rent the mists, 
and began to warm India into life again. The cease- 
less caw of crows began to half-soothe, half-madden 
for another day ; the keen smell of dung-fires rose 
into the lighter air. By the time the melancholy 
Ganges had sunk into its desert behind us the land 
was possible for life, and we were puffing briskly 
through the brilliant tobacco, dark indigo, and pale 
opium-poppies of Behar. We puffed and pufFed, 
halting or changing now and again, till the astounding 
sight of five white men in a carriage together hinted 
that something unusual was afoot. A station or two 
later, sure enough, appeared arches shouting " Wel- 
come ! " and " Long live the Empress ! " There was 
a concourse of servants in maroon and gold liveries, 
and a great array of dust-clothed natives. From the 
station the road was marked by green and red flags 

103 



The Maharajah Bahadur 

every ten yards or so, with half-uniformed native 
policemen standing at attention to guard them. We 
w^ere plainly there. 

As we drove from the station, the crowd became 
every moment thicker. By the time we swung in 
under the last of the arches there was a wall of them 
— a purple or yellow turban here and there, but for the 
most part an unaffected peasant crowd in the labour- 
stained white calico of their working days. Their 
demeanour was respectful but confident, they came 
very near the apogee of looking glad. And it was 
evident in a minute that we were on a model estate. 
The garden we were rolling through was without 
reproach for order and neatness — perhaps the only 
native's garden in India that is. Presently we came 
to the stables : I rubbed my eyes, and asked if this 
were really untidy India. Solid buildings, speck- 
less cleanness, sound drainage, air everywhere — it was 
no wonder that coats were like satin, eyes bright, and 
action free. Here was a scion of the house of 
Danegelt, English coachers, Arabs, Walers, country- 
breds, and scientific crosses — well over a hundred in 
all. Not that either the late or the present Ma- 
harajah is a great sportsman ; they are simply needed to 
do the work of the enormous estate and household. 

While we looked, the team was put into the coach 
and off we went, four-in-hand, to see the grounds. It 
was not easy to tell their size, for the drives wound 
in and out, twisting till you could hardly tell whether 

104 



The Maharajah Bahadur 

you had gone a couple of miles or had circled back 
to your starting-point. In this season they were 
parched j leaves were pale, and grass almost white. 
But even so they were cooled to the eye with blue 
lakes and the shade of swishing trees. They were 
tufted with every variety of palm, pillars of grey stem 
with capitals of green sheath, or the dwarf crowns of 
fronds that till lately it cost a man's life to smuggle 
out of Japan. Below them sloped tiers of bushes, 
green, red, and yellow ; below these nestled flowers. 
It was the East for profusion, the West for trimness. 
So we came to a denser crowd before a walled court, 
and entered; and then looked and blinked. There 
was a guard of honour of police and half-a-dozen 
finely mounted sowars in the Maharajah's maroon and 
gold. There was a Eurasian band in short jackets, 
white-braided trousers, and little round braided caps 
stuck on one side — the band from a South Coast pier 
slightly soiled. But that was nothing. Besides them, 
standing vacuously or lolling on the grass, were 
wondrous creatures in the most flaring raiment eyes 
ever ached to contemplate. Their tunics were of such 
a green as cold words can never hint at — the colour 
of green baize fired with a tinge of the hottest yellow. 
Below they wore orange trousers, and vermilion 
decorated and inflamed the whole. They bore great 
fans on long silver poles — fans of yellow and crimson 
satin, with suns and stars embroidered on them with 
gold thread and pearls. 

105 



The Maharajah Bahadur 

Suddenly the Maharajah bounded on to the scene, 
again in his ultramarine and grass-colour, dashed into 
the durbar tent, rushed at his guests, his English 
tumbling over itself in all the excitement of a child on 
his birthday. Then he sprang into his state carriage, 
amid a boom of blessing from selected priests, and was 
away to meet his Honour. I went inside the durbar 
tent, and gasped again. On a dais stood the Lieuten- 
ant-Governor's chair — green velvet back, rose velvet 
seat, silver frame, gold borders, promiscuous pearls. 
Before the dais, on the right, was a similar chair for 
the Maharajah. Behind was another group of baize- 
and-fire green, orange and vermilion ; more fans ; also 
an old gentleman in silver-flowered crimson silk with 
a bossy silver trumpet-shaped mace as long as him- 
self: he smiled with concentration at nothing, and ap- 
peared to have been drinking his new lordship's 
health. And to round ofF the silver and gold and 
pearls, there depended from the roof about forty 
chandeliers and lamps, cheap green, cheap blue, cheap 
purple, their wire skeletons askew, short of a drop 
here and a drop there, insulting the daylight, rem- 
iniscent partly of seaside lodgings, partly of the morn- 
ing after an Oxford wine-party. O India ! 

The pavilion was already full. There were the 
European managers of the estate — something like a 
dozen of them — and the babus of the estate also. 
Portly gentlemen in spectacles and weak beards, in 
black or fawn garments, half coats, half shirts, but 

io6 



The Maharajah Bahadur 

with clear skins, twinkling eyes, and smiles neither 
fawning nor patronising — these Behari babus were by- 
far the cleanest men of this class I had seen. And 
there, especially, were all the Maharajah's rich rela- 
tions to support him — and his poor relations also, to 
be supported. They are all Brahmans of the most 
exclusive sanctity : all wore white turbans of a pecul- 
iar shape, with a low peak over the forehead, and all 
had elaborate designs in white and red paint on their 
foreheads. All dripped with attar of roses. One 
tiny, liquid-eyed, small-boned nephew wore Prussian- 
blue velvet and lemon yellow ; his brother at his side, 
droop-headed like a flower, and dissolving in smiles 
like a woman, was content with black and a faded 
Kashmir shawl — again that seaside landlady ! — worn 
something like a bath-towel. Others wore flowered 
silk — lilac shirt and carmine trousers, both rippling 
with silver. Behind you could see the headpieces — 
half crowns, half pastrycooks' caps — of solemn-faced 
babies. And most gorgeous of all was a very impor- 
tant relation from off the railway line, a big man, 
speaking nothing but a kind of jungly Hindustani, 
with a caste-mark as elaborate as a cobweb on a fore- 
head the colour of a pickled walnut, attired in a gown 
all of white satin and gold and pearls, twitching his 
leg incessantly on the pivot of a yellow-leather toe, 
massive, grim, and gorgeous — Mr. Rutland Barrington 
as Pooh-Bah. 

The scrunch of wheels outside, the splutter of the 

107 



The Maharajah Bahadur 

everlasting salute, " God Save the Queen," from the 
Eurasian band, with one flute playing like a dentist's 
file ! Then the Maharajah for a moment : but he 
must not be seen at the beginning. Then another 
carriage, and a rosy, rather chubby, British gentleman 
in a plain frock-coat with the Star of India. The 
Lieutenant-Governor bowed his way through bows 
and salaams to the dais. Then two of his staff 
walked to the farther door and led back the Maharajah. 
The little Maharajah — but how resplendent ! His 
rose-silk turban sparkled with bullion and diamonds, 
and three jewelled aigrettes stood up from it. Over 
the blue and green he had a mantle of black velvet, 
richly broidered with white : the white was all pearls. 
Round his neck was a heavy necklace, with sapphires 
and topazes and diamonds and emeralds as large as 
your finger-tip. 

He crept rather than walked forward to the dais. 
The fresh-coloured, bright-eyed Lieutenant-Governor 
stood up ; the Viceroy's patent was read, and then his 
Honour addressed his Highness in a speech. The 
Maharajah, so radiant and so tiny, crouched before 
him ; he crushed his handkerchief in his damp hand, 
and the caste-mark was sweating off his forehead. 
He looked again like a little boy, not quite sure 
whether his schoolmaster would call him good or 
naughty. 

It was all over in ten minutes : a shining attendant 
brought forward attar of roses and beetle-nut in gold 

io8 



The Maharajah Bahadur 

vessels, the Governor dispensed a little of each, and 
the Maharajah was now Maharajah indeed. Then, as 
all filed out, he slipped off his velvet mantle, for the 
pearls shower from it so peltingly that he has to be 
followed by a man with a bag. After that, it was 
just like a coming-of-age — lunch, which the orthodox 
Brahman host did not attend, speeches, sports in a 
meadow so thronged that you could have walked on 
brown heads. But you seldom see a coming-of-age 
at home with forty-five elephants in line, swaying 
their great foreheads under pink and scarlet silk, and 
flashing back the sun from howdahs of silver and 
carved ivory. 

Yet the sight of all that stuck was the little 
scented, jewel-crusted atomy perspiring before the 
gentleman in the plain frock-coat. If the Maharajah 
came to England he would have all our greatest men 
and fairest women in a ring round him ; St. James's 
and the Mansion House would compete for his smiles, 
and Windsor would delight to honour him. When 
the Lieutenant-Governor comes home, the odds are 
he will take a little place in the country, and be very 
poor and not over-healthy ; and his neighbours, who 
will find him rather dull, will say that they have 
heard he was something in India. The man that was 
as God to seventy-five million people ! And the 
other that cowered at his feet ! Good Lord ! what 
do we know ? 



109 



XII 

DARJILING 

In Calcutta they grumbled that the hot weather 
was beginning already. Mornings were steamy, days 
sticky, and the municipal impurities rose rankly. 
The carter squatted over his bullocks with his shining 
body stark naked but for a loin-cloth. 

At Siliguri, the bottom of the ascent to Darjiling, 
the rough grass and the tea-gardens were sheeted at 
sunrise in a silver frost. What few natives appeared 
happed their heads in shawls as if they had toothache. 

It takes you an afternoon and a night to get as far 
as Siliguri. What you principally notice on the way 
is the dulness of the flat, moist richness of Bengal, 
and the extraordinary fulness of the first-class car- 
riages. Even at this winter season the residents of 
Calcutta snatch at the chance of being cold for 
twenty-four hours. When you get out of your car- 
riage at the junction station, you see on the other side 
of the platform a dumpy little toy train — a train at 
the wrong end of a telescope with its wheels cut from 
beneath it. Engines and trucks and carriages seem to 
be crawling like snakes on their bellies. Six miniature 
easy-chairs, three facing three, on an open truck with 
an awning, make a first-class carriage. 

no 



Darjiling 

This is the Darjiling-Himalaya Railway — two-foot 
gauge, climbing four feet to the hundred for fifty 
miles up the foothills of the greatest mountains in the 
world. It is extraordinary as the only line in India 
that has been built with Indian capital. But you will 
find that the least of its wonders. A flat-faced hill- 
man bangs with a hammer twice three times on a 
spare bit of railway metal hung up by way of a gong, 
the v/histle screams, and you pant away on surely the 
most entrancing railway journey in the world. Nothing 
very much to make your heart jump in the first seven 
miles. You bowl along the surface of a slightly as- 
cending cart-road, and your view is mostly bamboo 
and tea. Graceful enough, and cool to the eye — the 
bamboos, hedges or clumps of slender stem with 
plumes of pale leaf swinging and nodding above them ; 
the tea, trim ranks and files of short, well-furnished 
bushes with lustrous, dark-green leaves, not unlike 
evergreens or myrtle in a nursery at home, — but you 
soon feel that you have known bamboo and tea all 
your life. Then suddenly you begin to climb, and 
all at once you are in a new world — a world of 
plants. 

A new world is easy to say, but this Is new indeed 
and a very world — such a primeval vegetable world as 
you have read of in books and eked out with dreams. 
It has everything you know in your world, only 
everything expressed in vegetation. It is a world in 
its variety alone. Trees of every kind rise up round 

III 



Darjiling 

you at every angle — unfamiliar, most of them, and 
exaggerations of forms you know, as if they were seen 
through a microscope. You might come on such 
broad fleshy leaves by way of Jack's giant beanstalk. 
Other growths take the form of bushes as high as our 
trees j but beside them are skinny, stunted starvelings, 
such as the most niggardly country might show. Then 
there are grasses — tufted, ruddy bamboo grass, and 
huge yellow straws with giant bents leaning insolently 
over to flick your face as you go by. Smaller still 
grow the ferns, lurking shyly in the crevices of the 
banks. And over everything, most luxuriant of every- 
thing, crawl hundred-armed creepers, knitting and 
knotting the whole jungle into one mellay of strug- 
gling life. 

The varieties — the trees and shrubs and grasses and 
ferns and creepers — you would see in any tropical 
garden; but you could not see them at home. You 
could not see them in their unpruned native inter- 
course one with the other. The rise and fall of the 
ground, the whims of light and air, coax them into 
shapes that answer to the most fantastic imagination. 
Now you are going through the solemn aisles of a 
great cathedral — grey trunks for columns, with arches 
and vaulted roofs of green, with dark, retreating 
chapels and altar-trappings of mingled flowers. Now 
it is a king's banqueting-hall, tapestried with white- 
flowering creeper and crimson and purple bougain- 
villea ; overhead the scarlet-mahogany blossoms of a 

112 



Darjiling 

sparse-leaved tulip-tree might be butterflies frescoed 
on a ceiling. 

Fancy can compel the wilderness into moments of 
order, but wild it remains. The growths are not gen- 
erally buildings, but animate beings in a real world. 
You see no perfectly shaped tree, as in a park or 
garden ; one is warped, another stunted, another bare 
below — each formed, like men, by the pressure of a 
thousand fellows. Here is a corpse spreading white, 
stark arms abroad. Here are half-a-dozen young 
creatures rolling over each other like puppies at play. 
And there is a creeper flinging tumultuous, enrap- 
tured arms round a stately tree ; presently it is grip- 
ping it in thick bands like Laocoon's serpent, then 
choking it mercilessly to death, then dead itself, its 
bleached, bare streamers dangling limply in the wind. 
It is life, indeed, this forest — plants fighting, victorious 
and vanquished ; loving and getting children ; spring- 
ing and waxing and decaying and dying — our own 
world of men translated into plants. 

While I am spinning similitudes, the Darjiling- 
Himalaya Railway is panting always upwards, boring 
through the thick world of trees like a mole. Now 
it sways round a curve so short that you can almost 
look back into the next carriage, and you understand 
why the wheels are so low. Now it stops dead, and 
almost before it stops starts backwards up a zigzag, 
then forwards up another, and on again. In a mo- 
ment it is skating on the brink of a slide of shale that 

113 



Darjiling 

trembles to come down and overwhelm it ; next it is 
rumbling across a bridge above the point it passed ten 
minutes ago, and below that which it will reach ten 
minutes hence. Twisting, backing, circling, dodging, 
but always rising, it unthreads the skein whose end is 
in the clouds and the snows. 

Presently the little engine draws quite clear of the 
jungle. You skirt opener slopes, and the blue plain 
below is no longer a fleeting vista, but a broad pros- 
pect. You see how the forest spills itself on to the 
fields and spreads into a dark puddle ovier their light- 
ness. You see a great river overlaying the dimness 
with a ribbon of steel. The ferns grow thicker about 
you ; gigantic fronds bow at you from gullies over- 
head, and you see the tree-fern — a great crown of 
drooping green on a trunk of a man's height — stand- 
ing superbly alone, knowing its supreme gracefulness. 
Next, as you rise and rise, the air gets sharp ; through 
a gauzy veil of mist appear again huge forests, but 
dark and gloomy with brown moss dripping dankly 
from every branch. Rising, rising, and you have now 
come to Ghoom, the highest point. Amid the cold 
fog appears the witch of Ghoom — a hundred years 
old, with a pointed chin and mop of grizzled hair all 
witch-fashion, but beaming genially and requesting 
backsheesh. 

Then round a corner — and here is Darjiling. A 
scattered settlement on a lofty ridge, facing a great 
cup enclosed by other ridges — mountains elsewhere, 

114 



Darjiling 

here hills. Long spurs run down into the hollow, 
half black with forest, half pale and veined with 
many paths. At the bottom is a little chequer of 
fresh green millet j the rim at the top seems to line 
the sky. 

And the Himalayas and the eternal snows ? The 
devil a Himalaya in sight. Thick vapours dip down 
and over the very rim of the cup ; beyond Darjiling 
is a tumult of peaked creamy cloud. You need not 
be told it, — clouds that hide mountains always ape 
their shapes, — the majestic Himalayas are behind 
that screen, and you will not see them to-day, nor 
perhaps to-morrow, nor yet for a fortnight of to- 
morrows. 

You must console yourself with Darjiling and the 
hillmen. And Darjiling is pleasant to the eye as 
you look down on it, a huddle of grey corrugated- 
iron roofs, one stepping over the other, hugging the 
hillside with one or two red ones to break the mono- 
tone. There is no continuous line of them: each 
stands by itself in a ring of deep green first. The 
place is cool and grateful after an Indian town — 
clean and roomy, a place of homes and not of pens. 

In the middle of it is the bazaar, and my day, 
by luck, was market-day. Here, again, you could 
never fancy yourself in India. A few Hindus there 
are, but beside the dumpy hillmen their thin limbs, 
tiny features, and melting eyes seem hardly human. 
More like the men you know is the Tibetan, with 

115 



Darjiling 

a long profile and long, sharp nose, though his hat 
has the turned-up brim of the Chinee, though he 
wears a long bottle-green dressing-gown open to the 
girdle, and his pigtail knocks at the back of his knees. 
But the prevailing type, though as Mongolian, is far 
more genial than the Tibetan. Squat little men, 
for the most part, fill the bazaar, with broad faces 
that give room for the features, with button noses, and 
slits for eyes. They wear boots and putties, or 
gaiters made of many-coloured carpet-bagging; and 
their women are like them — with shawls over their 
heads, and broad sashes swathing them from bosom 
to below the waist, with babies slung behind their 
backs, not astride on the hip as are the spawn of 
India. Their eyes are black as sloes — puckered, too, 
but seeming puckered with laughter ; and their clear 
yellow skins are actually rosy on the cheeks, like a 
ripe apricot. Square-faced, long-pigtailed, plump, 
cheery, open of gaze, and easy of carriage, rolling 
cigarettes, and offering them to soothe babies — they 
might not be beautiful in Europe; here they are 
ravishing. 

But you come to Darjiling to see the snows. So on 
a night of agonising cold — feet and hands a block of 
ice the moment you cease to move them — must fol- 
low a rise before it is light. Maybe the clouds will 
be kinder this morning. No ; the same stingy, clammy 
mist, — only there, breaking through it, high up in the 
sky — yes, there are a few faint streaks of white. Just 

Ii6 



Darjiling 

a few marks of snow scored on the softer white of the 
cloud, chill with the utterly disconsolate cold of ice 
through a window of fog. Still, there are certainly 
Himalayas there. 

Up and up I toiled ; the sun was plainly rising be- 
hind the ridge of Darjiling. In the cup below the 
sunlight was drawing down the hillsides and peeling 
off the twilight. Then, at a sudden turn of the wind- 
ing ascent, I saw the summit of Kinchinjunga. Just 
the summit, poised in the blue, shining and rejoicing 
in the sunrise. And as I climbed and climbed, other 
peaks rose into sight below and beside him, all 
dazzling white, mounting and mounting the higher I 
mounted, every instant more huge and towering and 
stately, boring into the sky. 

Up — till I came to the summit, and the sun ap- 
peared — a golden ball swimming in a sea of silver. 
He was sending the clouds away curling before him ; 
they drifted across the mountains, but he pursued and 
smote and dissolved them. And ever the mountains 
rose and rose, huger and huger; as they swelled up 
they heaved the clouds away in rolls off their 
shoulders. Now their waists were free, and all but 
their feet. Only a chasm of fog still hid their lower 
slopes. Fifty miles away, they looked as if I could 
toss a stone across to them ; only you could never 
hope to hit their heads, they towered so gigantically. 
Now the clouds, clearing to right and left, laid bare 
a battlemented range of snow-white wall barring the 

117 



Darjiling 

whole horizon. Behind these appeared other peaks : 
it was not a range, but a country of mountains, not 
now a wall, but a four-square castle carved by giants 
out of eternal ice. It was the end of the world — a 
sheer rampart, which forbade the fancy of anything 
beyond. 

And in the centre, by peak and col and precipice, 
the prodigy reared itself up to Kinchinjunga. Bare 
rock below, then blinding snow seamed with ridges 
and chimneys, and then, above, the mighty summit — 
a tremendous three-cornered slab of grey granite be- 
tween two resplendent faces of snow. Other moun- 
tains tiptoe at the sky snatch at it with a peak like a 
needle. Kinchinjunga heaves himself up into it, 
broadly, massively, and makes his summit a diadem. 
He towers without effort, knowing his majesty. Sub- 
lime and inviolable, he lifts his grey nakedness and 
his mail of burnished snow, and turns his forehead 
serenely to sun and storm. Only their touch, of all 
things created, has perturbed his solitude since the 
birth of time. 



ii8 



XIII 
THE VILLAGERS 

The tents of my host, the landlord of fifty villages, 
were pitched under a black-green mango-grove. The 
headman of the next village but one had come into 
camp to conduct the Presence to see his property — a 
tall, thin-legged old man w^ith white hair and mous- 
tache, wearing only a dust- white shirt and drawers 
and a little linen band round the middle of his right 
calf. When he came up he salaamed and salaamed, 
and then held out a rupee in the palm of his hand. 
The landlord touched it and salaamed, — the one 
signifying thereby that all that was his was his lord's, 
the other that of his bounty he remitted the same. 

We plodded ofF in the happy sunshine, over a 
switchback track of caked mud and powdered dust, 
through cornfields pancake-flat for as far as a man 
could see. With the barley they had sown rape, 
now in tall, yellow bloom or just making seed. Here 
and there a grove of trees ; now and again a brown- 
legged, bowing cultivator; all the rest was a canopy 
of pale-blue sunlight spread over a carpet of full- 
blooded green shot with gold. 

119 



The Villagers 

When we came to the tumble of mud-wall and 
grass thatch, peasants streamed out from every hole ! 
All bore rupees, and hurried, salaaming, to have them 
touched and remitted : such is the use of India. But 
as rupees have ever been scarcer than men, you saw 
one furtively pass the wherewithal for the necessary 
salutation behind his back to another. They led us 
with ceremony to the village meeting-place — a fair- 
sized open portico of sun-dried mud brick, with a 
yard before it under trees. There two old wicker 
chairs were set for the sahibs, and the village stared 
in a semicircle before us. A few white-bearded elders 
— the ryot does not often live to fifty — many young 
men, more children, they stood or squatted on their 
heels after the native mode ; not on the ground, under- 
stand, but literally on the tendons of their heels. As 
it was midday, most of them were naked but for a 
loin-cloth. There was little enough of the rainbow 
brightness of city costume ; a shawl or two had once 
been red, but most had never been more than white, 
and were now but a shade whiter than their owners* 
fields. As the landlord discoursed of crops and rain 
and canals, fathers held their babies on their hips — 
the women, of course, were hidden indoors — and it 
was a little pathetic to contrast the pot-bellies of the 
children with the skin-and-bone of the men. It is 
scarce exaggerating to say that every rich native in 
India is fat : watch him shovelling rice into himself 
by the handful, and you will agree that it would be a 

120 



The Villagers 

miracle if he were not. Wherefrom you infer that 
the hundreds of millions of skeletons are lean be- 
cause they must — because they live from harvest to 
seed-time and through to harvest again with bellies 
half empty. 

But they are a patient people, the villagers of 
India; they have been hungry these thirty centuries 
or so, and it has never occurred to them that they 
have any claim to be filled. They grumbled a little, 
to be sure : what tiller of the soil ever did else ? They 
could not get enough water from the Government 
canal, and the Christmas rains had not fallen ; and 
they were poor men. When, in due course, we went 
out to inspect everything — from the fields to the 
cakes of cow-dung fuel that were being stacked and 
covered up against the rainy season — the landlord 
observed a broken well, and ofi^ered to pay one-half 
of its repairing if the village would pay the other. 
They responded with effusion that if the sahib would 
find bricks and mortar and labour they would do the 
rest. Yet, though not self-helpful, they remained 
polite, and desired that their lords would honour them 
by drinking a cup of milk. So two little earthen cups 
were brought, of the material of flower-pots, and into 
them was poured milk still hot from the udder. Their 
lords drank; and then the cups were smashed to earth. 
They were useless now : the man of meanest caste 
would never drink out of a cup that had been polluted 
by white lips. Water was brought, and the man who 

121 



The Villagers 

had poured out the milk washed his hands thoroughly. 
The landlord asked his manager if he would take milk 
too : he shook his head, with a smile ; for he is a 
Brahman, and is as much above drinking from a vessel 
that a lower caste has touched as the lower caste is 
above drinking after a sahib. 

Now, as the bits of potsherd were still trembling on 
the ground, there struck up a loud, half-rollicking, 
half-wailing chorus behind the corner of the wall. 
There appeared a little group of women in very faded 
garments, half-veiling their faces carefully, half-turn- 
ing their backs. These were low-caste women, and 
they were singing a hymn expressive of the virtues of 
the landlord. That also is use and wont. The sub- 
ject of their praise called up one grand-dam and gave 
her silver, and the chorus stopped, amid the approv- 
ing salaams of the village. They will call you 
" Lord " and " Protector of the Poor " ; they will 
sing hymns to you ; but they smash the bowl you 
drank from. What could be more eloquent of the 
land of contradictions ? 

The cultivator, to whom both these formalities are 
religion, is not, you will have concluded, a being of 
developed intelligence. He is neither beautiful nor 
rich, gifted nor industrious, nor especially virtuous, 
nor even amiable. He loves and cherishes his chil- 
dren with a solicitude that is truly beautiful : for that, 
and because he is a simple creature, you love him. 
Yet he is as malignant as he is simple, always has an 

122 



The Villagers 

enemy, and sticks at nothing in the world to ruin him. 
The cultivator presents only one point of interest, 
which is that there are two hundred and forty millions 
of him. He is clothed in calico and fed on un- 
leavened dough, called chaputties, and on pulse. He 
has two distractions — marriages and funerals. At 
these he feasts all his neighbours, and spends all he 
has and more. To make up, he borrows from the 
village bunnia, who is shopkeeper and Shylock in one. 
The bunnia charges thirty-seven and a-half per cent, 
as a minimum. When harvest comes, he takes over 
the ryot's corn and credits him for it, not at market 
price, but on a scale of his own. The ryot keeps 
back enough, perhaps, for a few weeks' food : after 
that he must come to the bunnia for seed at sowing- 
time, and weekly through the year for his children's 
food. The bunnia lends him back his own corn at 
thirty-seven and a-half to seventy-five per cent. 
Presently, it may be, the bunnia takes one of the 
ryot's bullocks in part-payment, and the man makes 
shift to plough with one. He does it very badly, 
though not much worse than he would have done 
with the two. Then, perhaps, the bunnia takes the 
other bullock, and then — but rarely, for this is killing 
the goose — the land. Or it may be the ryot has the 
luck to live all his life without paying his creditor 
anything beyond his whole income, less his bare live- 
lihood. Then he dies happy, and bequeathes the re- 
mainder of his debt to his son. On that capital the 

123 



The Villagers 

son cheerfully starts upon life, and never dreams of 
repudiating. 

Nevertheless, when the landlord offers to buy crops 
at market rate and to advance seed-corn at market 
rate, charging only six per cent, interest, the culti- 
vator smiles cunningly and declines. He knows that 
the landlord will not lend him for weddings and 
funerals, and if he borrows seed from the landlord 
neither will the bunnia ; so he goes back to his thirty- 
seven and a-half. He has only his own ignorance, 
indolence, and thriftlessness to thank for his wretched- 
ness. He is miserable, and he is content. Every- 
body else in India has a grievance : the cultivator, the 
backbone of the country and the worst-used man in 
it, has none. 

That his situation really is his fault, you may con- 
vince yourself by going on ten miles or so to a Jat 
village. The Jats are a not very illustrious tribe, 
whose centre a hundred years ago was Bhurtpur : at 
that period they rose to military eminence, and when- 
ever they were short of cash looted Agra ; also they 
inflicted on our arms one of the severest defeats we 
ever got in India. As cultivators, the Jats are excel- 
lently good, being both expert and of an unwearied 
industry. 

Even before their village peeps from behind its 
thickets, you notice that the road is exceptional — not 
metalled, of course, but still flat and fairly level. 
The bullocks you meet in the heavy-wheeled carts are 

124 



The Villagers 

big and well-thriven. In the village itself, the houses 
are mostly of sun-dried mud, it is true, but they are 
stable and lofty ; moreover, before several of the best 
lay piles of fire-burnt brick. One Croesus actually 
had a tall burnt-brick gateway with a many-pointed 
arch. There were more brass vessels to be seen than 
earthern, which is a sure sign of prosperity. Then 
there was a little hole in the corner wall for a lamp at 
night, which reeked of public spirit ; and in one rich 
man's court were no less than two horses. His house 
was well-built ; its sole furniture was six wood-framed 
cord-strung bedsteads and some brazen pots. But 
that is all he and his family want, and his two- 
year-old filly will bring him a little fortune at the 
horse-fair next month. 

Even in the excitement of the landlord's visit, the 
secret of Jat prosperity was plain enough — simply 
work. At the entrance to the village the sugar-mill 
was going — three dumpy, upright rollers revolved by 
a lever, which two oxen pulled round and round ; as 
a boy thrust in the cane, the squeezed fragments of 
stalk fell out on one side to be used for fuel, and the 
juice ran into a tank on the other. It was boiling in 
vats under a roof hard by, and the yellow result — 
pease-pudding you would have called it at ten yards 
— was already being made into cakes of the finished 
product. The man who invented the machine gets 
back its cost in two years' hire of it, and has made 
a fortune. But the Jats do well with their sugar, 

125 



The Villagers 

despite the rent, of the machine. They work day and 
night at it, yoke relieving yoke of oxen ; and they toil 
thus at everything. 

But in this world even Jats are not always happy. 
When, at the village meeting-place, after the milk- 
bowls were duly smashed, the landlord asked if all 
was well, a mean-looking young man, holding the 
manager's horse, cried aloud that it was not. He was 
of a low caste, which in towns usually works in 
leather, in villages does any menial labour it can. 
Now, in this village were sixteen families of the caste, 
and the manager had promised them the lease of 
certain land then held by the headman of the village. 
But Hukm Singh had not given it up, cried the 
shabby youth, and, moreover, had oppressed their 
people and got a decree from the law-court by fraud 
and attached their standing crops. " Is it even so ? " 
said the landlord. " Come then to my tents in the 
afternoon, and let Hukm Singh come also." For 
the headman, at the moment, was discreetly absent. 
" Will I come ? " cried the young man of low caste. 
" I will run ; I will follow my lord now." 

Every afternoon the sahib sits in his office-tent and 
his tenants squat before him and cry aloud their 
plaints, and he does justice between them, as it was in 
the age of gold. First comes, out of politeness, the 
owner of the mango-grove we are camped in. "You 
see, I am again camping on your land," says the sahib. 
" I am my lord's," replies the owner, radiant in gold- 

126 



The Villagers 

braided cap, dove-coloured cloth coat, and clean 
white drawers that cling like a skin, " and all that is 
mine is my lord's." Then he goes on to complain 
that he has lost three thousand rupees by a speculation 
in corn, and more besides by hoar-frost and the want 
of the Christmas rain. He recalls with a sigh the 
golden day when a cavalry regiment, marching from 
Aligarh, camped in the middle of his wheat-field ; 
whereafter the native officials did indeed intercept 
his compensation on its way to him, but by reason of 
the manure he got the best crop ever seen in any 
country. "If the merciful God will send us rain," 
he sighs, rising, " it may yet be well " ; and goes out, 
knowing himself none the less to be a rich man and 
the best-reputed in all the country-side. For when 
his father died he feasted sixteen villages ! 

Next the complaints. The manager sits on the 
floor at the landlord's feet, and the clerk, sitting be- 
side him, reads out Hindustani documents in a de- 
corous official drone. While he still reads, the 
plaintiff, squatting on his heels in the dust-clothed, 
pucker-faced, starveling ring outside the tent, breaks 
in ; before he is well started the defendant adds a 
third voice to the chorus. Each slaps his palm and 
waves his arms with conviction. All the complaints 
are of robbery, of fraud upon the poor by the not- 
quite-so-poor. An official of the estate has taken five 
shillings of rent and given no receipt ; a man was 
granted a plot for his house, but his brother, who al- 

127 



The Villagers 

ready had enough, has seized it, and will not let him 
build thereon. 

Then come the low-caste people and the headman. 
The case, which the courts only made worse, now 
takes what you call a sensational development. " My 
lord," says the defendant, " it is even so. I lied be- 
fore the court, but before the Presence I cannot lie. 
It was thus. When I told the manager I would quit 
the land, I believed it was to be let to men of my 
own caste. But when I found it was to these, what 
could I do ? So I told the manager I would give up 
the land and did not." It should be explained that a 
landlord can only evict a tenant during three months 
of the year, when the fields are presumably bare of 
tillage ; and by his promise to the manager the wily 
headman had staved over this period. " Then, when 
these people trouble me," he adds, entirely unashamed, 
though his victims and half his acquaintance are 
squatting by, " I went to the village accountant, and 
since three families of them owed me money and I 
had no bond, I induced him to write in his register 
that this was not a loan but rent. So I went to the 
court and we swore, and attached their crops." 
Again, it must be explained that there is a summary 
process to recover rent, but not to recover other 
debts : the headman had bribed the accountant to 
falsify his register by way of putting on the screw; 
and the court had believed the headman and the 
registrar. 

128 



The Villagers 

The rich man told his story without a blush, and 
none of his countrymen condemned him. But the 
Presence ordered that the attachment should be taken 
ofF and the land leased to the poor families ; at the 
same time the debtors must give a bond and repay by 
easy instalments at six per cent. From all of which 
proceedings you will perceive that the ryot's foes are 
of his own household. 

So, having protected the poor, the landlord strolls 
forth into the divine Indian evening. The pungent 
peat-smelling smoke from the fires lies in low grey 
stripes in the breathless silence. From a tower in 
the village floats the voice of the muezzin as he calls 
the believers to prayer. At the well mild-eyed bul- 
locks draw a rope down an incline ; a huge leather 
bucket comes up, and is emptied into the stone cis- 
terns and conduits about the base. Men are washing 
their clothes, women their cooking-pots ; the water- 
seller fills his skin and carries it away, dripping, on 
his brown back. Through the conduits the water 
sluices out among the barley j in the fields men with 
big-bladed hoes break down or build up the little 
earthen embankments that guide the blessed water 
this way and that. The canal the Government made 
is full to-day, so water is plentiful ; it runs even into 
the waste pool whence the Government made a drain 
and siphoned it under the canal to carry off the water- 
logging of the wet season. At the pool the washer- 
men are beating clothes clean against large stones. 

129 



The Villagers 

In a field embanked into little chequers an old man 
is pricking out onions. " I am planting them for my 
lord," says he with politeness, " since frost killed the 
potatoes that were here." " Did the frost then go so 
deep down into the ground as to kill the potato 
roots ? " asks the landlord, incredulous. " If you cut 
off a man's head," responds the sage, " how shall he 
walk upon his feet ? " 



130 



XIV 
THE CITY OF SHAH JEHAN 

The north-eastern approach to Agra is through a 
waste of land at the same time flat and broken. 
Formless hillocks and ditches, colourless sand and 
dead turf, the whole scene was mean and depressing. 
I raised my eyes, and there, on the edge of the ugly 
prairie, sat a fair white palace with domes and min- 
arets. So exquisite in symmetry, so softly lustrous in 
tint, it could hardly be substantial, and I all but cried, 
" Mirage ! " It was the Taj Mahal. 

And now we were clanking over an iron bridge 
above a dark-green river that filled barely a quarter of 
its sandy bed ; deep, broad staircases stepped down to 
its further bank with pillared pleasure-houses over- 
looking them. Now on the right rose a great mosque, 
its bellying domes zigzagged with red and white; 
dawn from the left frowned the weather-worn battle- 
ments of a great red fortress. This was the city of 
Shah Jehan, emperor and devotee, artist and lover. 

And this, in a few words, is the passionate story of 
Shah Jehan. He was the grandson of Akbar the 
Great, the first Mogul Emperor of Hindustan. 
While yet Prince Royal, conquering India for the 
Moguls, he married the beautiful Persian, Arjmand 

131 



The City of Shah Jehan 

Banu, called Mumtaz-i-Mahal, the chosen of the palace, 
and loved her tenderly beyond all his wives for fourteen 
years. But only a year after he became Sultan she died 
in travail of her eighth child. Shah Jehan in his grief 
swore that she should have the loveliest tomb the 
world ever beheld, and for seventeen years he built 
the Taj Mahal. Also he built the palace of Agra, 
the fort and palace of Delhi, and the great mosque of 
Agra J he took to wife many fair ladies, and lived in 
all luxuriousness, ministering abundantly to every 
sense, till he had reigned thirty years. Then his son 
Aurungzebe rose up and dethroned him, and kept him 
a close prisoner in his own private mosque, which he 
had built within the palace of Agra. There he lived 
seven years more, attended by his daughter Jehanara, 
who would not leave him, till at last, in 1645, being 
grown very feeble, he begged to be laid in a chamber 
of the palace wherefrom he could see the Taj Mahal. 
This was granted him, so that he died with his eyes 
upon the tomb of the love of his youth. There they 
buried him beside her. And his daughter, when her 
time came, wrote a Persian stanza begging that no 
monument should be set up to " the humble transitory 
Jehanara," and praying only for her father's soul. 

Agra is the mirror of Shah Jehan. In the fort and 
palace you can read all the story of the warrior and 
the lover — in the fort so nakedly grim without and 
the palace so richly voluptuous within. Under the 
brow of the sheer sandstone walls you are dwarfed to 

132 



The City of Shah Jehan 

a pigmy. Before and beneath the great gateway 
stands a double curtain of loophole and machicolation 
and tower : you go in through cavernous guard-houses, 
up a ramp between sky-closing walls. Only thus do 
you reach the real entrance — the great Elephant 
Gate — two jutting octagon towers supporting spacious 
chambers thrown across the passage. On the lower 
storey all is closed,, and only white plaster designs re- 
lieve the savage masses of the sandstone ; in the upper 
balconies are windows and recesses, all decked with 
white, and above all runs a gallery crowned with cupolas. 
Under this arch you go, a dome above, deep and 
lofty recesses on either hand ; now you are past the 
sternness. Shah Jehan is soldier no longer but artist 
and amorist at large. You come to the Pearl Mosque. 
There is a Pearl Mosque at Delhi, sandstone slabs 
without, marble within, as this is; but the Delhi 
mosque is a bauble to this. This is a broad court, 
paved with slabs of marble, veined with white and 
blue, grey and yellow. This is all marble — marble 
walls with moulded panels, marble cloisters of multi- 
foliate arches, marble gateways breaking three walls 
of the square, marble columns supporting bell-cupolas 
above them and at each corner, a marble basin in the 
centre of the court, a marble sundial beside it. Along 
the west side of the court shines the glorious face of 
the mosque itself — only a roofed quarter of the whole 
space, a mere portico, but colonnaded with three rows 
of seven pillars apiece, each branching to right and 

^33 



The City of Shah Jehan 

left, to front and back, with eight-pointed, nine-leaved 
arches. Along the entablature above runs a Persian 
inscription in mosaic of black marble ; on the roof, 
over each pillar of the front row^, is a cupola with 
four columns, and at each corner a cupola with eight 
columns. Three domes fold their broad white wings 
behind and above all. 

Three steps for the mullah to preach from, and that 
is all the catalogue. No altar or shrine or image : 
there is no god but God. No carving or lattice-work : 
but the simple pillars and arches, the few cupolas and 
domes, are yet the richest of ornamentation. No 
paint or gems — only the clear harmonious veining of 
the marble. Only space and proportion, form and 
whispers of colour — and it is so beautiful that you 
can hardly breathe for rapture. The radiant marble 
ripples from shade to shade — snow-white, pearl-white, 
ivory-white — till it seems half alive. The bells and 
pinnacles are so light that they seem to float in the 
air. It cannot be a building, you whisper : it is en- 
chantment. 

But now go on to the palace. It has been battered 
and sacked — the Jats of Bhurtpur carried away the 
precious stones from the walls ; but through the res- 
torations you can dream of some of its delights when 
it held the houris of Shah Jehan. Dream this and it 
is all enchantment ; you have arrived at last — at last, 
after so many years, after so many leagues — in the 
dear country of your earliest dreams, and the Arabian 



The City of Shah Jehan 

Nights are come to life. Under this pillared hall the 
ambassadors of Shiraz and Samarkand are making 
their obeisance and displaying rich gifts. Above, in 
the marble alcove festooned with flowers and tendrils 
in pietra dura, reclines the Sultan of the Indies on a 
couch of white marble. Up the stairs — and here, en- 
closed by a colonnade of two storeys, is the fish-pond ; 
on the upper terrace under that canopy, which is one 
block of creamy marble embossed with flowers, sits 
the lovely favourite Schemselnihar, and makes believe 
to angle. She rises and follows the other lights of 
the harem into the little square court and portico that 
miniature the great Pearl Mosque without. But 
some of the beauties turn aside to the gallery, where, 
below, is an enclosed bazaar ; handsome young mer- 
chants of Baghdad tempt them with silks and brocades 
— and with looks that sigh and languish. They had 
best be prudent : eyes as fathomless as theirs have 
grown dim in the dungeons under the terraces, below 
the water. From lust to cruelty is only a step j and 
when the Sultan raised the marble and the gems he 
sank the dungeon, remote in a labyrinth of tunnels. 
Across it is a beam with a noose for soft necks and a 
shoot for frail bodies that tumbles them into the Jumna. 
The Sultan has risen from his audience : he walks 
round the terrace, through the delicious Hall of 
Private Audience, whose walls are marble, whose 
pillars are festooned with creepers in agate and jasper, 
jade and cornelian, whose ends are profound and 



The City of Shah Jehan 

graceful recesses, half-arch, half-dome. He passes to 
the heavy slab of the black marble throne on the 
riverside brink of the quadrangle ; in the pit below 
they let out buffaloes and tigers to light before him ; 
on the white seat behind him sits the court jester to 
make him merry. 

And now — it is the full moon that rises from an 
arch of the pavilion to the right — the full moon, 
though it is still broad day ? It is the Sultaness-in- 
Chief looking out at the fight from her abode in the 
Jasmine Tower. She has grown tired of throwing the 
dice, while her handmaidens stand for pieces on the 
pachisi-board that is let into her marble pavement — 
there, behind those duenna screens, the gauze of 
lattice-work that encloses her courtyard. She has 
grown tired of dabbling in the fountain that tinkles 
on the shallow basin of figured marble, v/ear)^ of her 
bower of marble inlaid with gems. The Sultan rises, 
and it is the signal for the bath — the bath in the dark 
Mirror Palace, lighted with a score of flambeaux and 
walled with a million tiny mirrors, that reflect . . . 
No ; we must not think of it — nor of the feast in the 
Private Palace, under the ceiling emblazoned with 
blue and crimson and gold — nor yet of the disrobing 
in the Golden Pavilion, where the ladies thrust their 
jewels into holes in the wall too narrow for a man's 
arm to follow them. . . . No ; you should not 
listen to what the Jester is saying now. 

But if you envy Shah Jehan, look again later into 

136 



The City of Shah Jehan 

the tiny Gem Mosque and the cupboard at the side, 
too small to turn in, where he is the uncrowned 
prisoner of his son. No Mirror Palace now : the 
ceiling is black where they heat the water for his 
bath, in a hole of a cistern where he cannot stretch 
out his limbs. Look again into the little gilt-domed 
cupola, where he lies dying, and Jehanara's voice 
sounds suddenly far away; and the very Taj, though 
he knows every angle and curve of it, swims in a 
grey-white blur; and nothing is left clear save the 
voice and face of the beautiful Persian, Arjmand 
Banu, whose palankeen followed all his campaigns in 
the days when empire was still a-winning, whose 
children called him father — Arjmand Banu, silent and 
unseen now for four-and-thirty years, the wife of his 
youth. 

Now follow him to the Taj. Under the great gate- 
way of strong sandstone ribbed with delicate marble, 
its vaulted red arch cobwebbed with white threads, 
and then before you — then the miracle of miracles, 
the final wonder of the world. In chaste majesty it 
stands suddenly before you, as if the magical word 
had called it this moment out of the earth. On a 
white marble platform it stands exactly four-square, 
but that the angles are cut off; nothing so rude as 
a corner could find place in its soft harmonies. Seen 
through the avenue, it looks high rather than broad ; 
seen from the pavement below it, it looks broad rather 
than high; you doubt, then conclude that its pro- 

137 



The City of Shah Jehan 

portions are perfect. Above its centre rises a full 
white dome, at each corner of whose base nestles a 
smaller dome, upheld on eight arches. The centre of 
each face is a lofty-headed gateway rising above the 
line of the roof; within it is again a pointed caving 
recess, half arch, half dome ; within this, again, a 
screen of latticed marble. On each flank of these, 
and on the facets of the cut-ofF angles, are pairs of 
smaller, blind recesses of the same design, one above 
the other. From each junction of facets rises a slim 
pinnacle. Everywhere it is embellished with elabor- 
ate profusion. Moulding, sculpture, inlaid frets and 
scrolls of coloured marbles, twining branches and gar- 
lands of jade and agate and cornelian — here is every 
point of lavish splendour you saw in the palace com- 
bined in one supreme embodiment — superb dignity 
matched with graceful richness. 

But it is vain to flounder amid epithets ; the man 
who should describe the Taj must own genius equal 
to his who built it. Description halts between its 
mass and its fineness. It makes you giddy to look up 
at it, yet it is so delicate you feel that a brick would 
lay it in shivers at your feet. It is a rock temple and 
a Chinese casket together — a giant gem. 

Nothing jars; for if the jewel were away the set- 
ting would still be among the noblest monuments on 
earth. The minarets at the four corners of the plat- 
form are a moment's stumbling-block : they look ir- 
reverently like the military masts of a battleship, and 

138 



The City of Shah Jehan 

the hard lines where the stones join remind you of a 
London subway. But look at the Taj itself, and the 
minarets fall instantly into place ; they set off its 
glories, and, standing like acolytes, seem to be chal- 
lenging you not to worship it. At each side, below 
the Taj, is a triple-domed building of sandstone and 
marble ; the hot red throws up the pearl-and-ivory 
softness of the Taj. The cloisters round the garden, 
the lordly caravanserai outside the gate, the clustering 
domes and mosaic texts from the Koran on the great 
gate itself— all this you hardly notice ; but when you 
do, you find that every point is perfection. As for 
the garden, with shady trees of every hue, from 
sprightly yellow to funereal cypress, with purple blos- 
soms cascading from the topmost boughs, with roses 
and lilies, phloxes and carnations — and the channel of 
clear water with twenty fountains that runs through 
the garden, and the basin with the goldfish. 
It is pure Arabian Nights ! You listen for the speak- 
ing bird and the singing tree. And was it not hither 
that Prince Ahmed, leaving his brother Ali to cuddle 
Nuronnihar in the palace, followed his arrow ? And 
is not that the fairy Peri-Banu coming out of the 
pleasure-house to welcome him ? Surely man never 
made such a Paradise : it must be the fabric of a 
dream wafted through gates of silver and opal. 

O Shah Jehan, Shah Jehan, you are bewitching a 
respectable newspaper-correspondent. The thought 
of you is strong wine. Shah Jehan, with your 

139 



The City of Shah Jehan 

queens and concubines without number, their amber 
feet mirrored in marble, their ivory limbs mirrored 
in quicksilver; Shah Jehan, who starved them in 
the black oubliettes, and hung them from the mouldy 
beam, and sluiced their beautiful bodies into the 
cold river ; Shah Jehan, with elephants and peacocks ; 
Shah Jehan, returning from the conquered Dekhan, 
dismounting in the Armoury Square, hastening 
through the Grape Garden, hastening past the fair 
ones in the Golden Pavilion to the fairest within the 
Jasmine Tower ! 

Shah Jehan — Grape Garden — Golden Pavilion — 
Jasmine Tower — there is dizzy magic in the very 
names. And when I turn aside in your garden, shun- 
ning your fierce black-and-scarlet petals to bring back 
my senses with English stocks and pansies, the sight 
of your Taj through the trees sends my brain areel 
again. I go in and stand by your tomb. The jewel- 
creepers blossom more luxuriantly than ever in the 
trellised screen that encloses it, and the two oblong 
cenotaphs are embowered in gems. But here it is 
dark and cool : light comes in only through double 
lattices of feathery marble. You look up into a dome, 
obscure and mysterious, but mightily expansive, as it 
were the vault of the heaven of the dead. It is very 
well ; it is the fit close. In this breathless twilight, 
after his battles and buildings, his ecstasies and tor- 
ments, his love and his loss. Shah Jehan has come to 
his own again for ever. 

140 



XV 

THE RULERS OF INDIA 

This short chapter contains nothing new or 
original. It is merely abstracted from books within 
the reach of everybody, and inserted here to save you 
the trouble of reaching them. In India you get a 
chance of seeing the actual work of Government 
being carried on — such a chance as is hardly possible 
at home. What is done in England in the offices of 
county councils or town councils, boards of guardians 
or school boards, or often of private companies, is 
usually done in India by one man sitting in a tent. 
But the actual instrument of Government works, of 
course, under a superstructure of higher authority. 
He, to most observers, is the most interesting wheel 
in the machine ; but to understand the nature and 
extent of his functions it is necessary to have an idea 
of the higher authorities also. 

The ultimate power in the Government of India is 
yourself. You, the British elector— subject to the 
usual formality of getting enough of the other electors 
to agree with you — can do with India exactly what 
you please. You control Parliament; Parliament 
controls the Cabinet; the Cabinet controls the Secre- 

141 



The Rulers of India 

tary of State for India, and the Secretary of State con- 
trols the Viceroy. And in India the Viceroy is 
supreme. He controls the Lieutenant-Governors of 
provinces, and they control the Commissioners of 
Divisions, and they control the District Officers, who 
control the people of India. 

There is a good long ladder, you observe, between 
you and the natives of India. In the last resort, if a 
question of very vital interest arose, you would dispose 
of their destiny. In the meantime, this House-that- 
Jack-built of control is only occasionally and partially 
effective — which is just as well for India. As it is, 
the Secretary of State, the Cabinet, and Parliament 
probably have far too much to say about Indian 
administration. So, at least, thinks everybody in 
India ; for where they have anything to say they are 
more likely than not — most naturally, seeing that they 
know next to nothing about it — to say the wrong 
thing. It is one of the unthinking commonplaces 
of the day to say that Parliament and the electorate 
are shamefully apathetic about India; that the thin 
attendance on an Indian Budget night shows a dis- 
graceful insensibility to the plain duty of a legislator ; 
that our political men should all visit India; and so 
on, to infinity and to nausea. Doubtless a visit to 
India might be a useful part of a political education, 
if the visitor had the prudence to spend most of his 
time collecting and collating the views of experts, and 
made no attempt to form independent opinions on 

142 



The Rulers of India 

subjects where a lifetime's observation still leaves 
you ignorant. But as for Indian Budgets and 
Indian questions, it wants only a moment of com- 
mon-sense to see that those who know nothing of 
India show their best wisdom in leaving such to those 
who do. 

However, let that pass for the present. Keeping 
this exposition to the authorities within India, the 
Viceroy is assisted by a Council, which practically 
constitutes his Cabinet. Lord Curzon represents the 
Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary ; the Financial 
member is Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the 
Military member Secretary for War; two members 
of the Civil Service take charge respectively of the 
Home Department and of Public Works ; while the 
Legal member, who must be a barrister of five years' 
standing, exists for the purpose of drafting bills. 
Each of these Cabinet Ministers has a permanent 
secretary under him and an office, as in Whitehall. 
The Commander-in-chief in India is an extraordinary 
member of this Council. 

For purposes of law-making, the Viceroy's Council 
is increased by additional members, who are not to 
be less than ten nor more than sixteen. The duties 
of these are purely consultative : they have no hand 
in the actual work of government. Six of these are 
officials, and about half are natives. Of the non- 
official members four are nominated by the non- 
official members of subordinate provincial councils, 

143 



The Rulers of India 

and a fifth by the Calcutta Chamber of Commerce. 
This you might call the Parliament of India. It 
meets round a long table in Government House — 
portraits of past Viceroys on the wall, a row of 
dining-room chairs for the public, members sitting 
down to speak. Altogether, it looks much more like 
a board of directors than a legislative assembly. The 
proceedings are not exciting, nor even audible ; there 
is hardly ever a division. No measure can be intro- 
duced unless the proposal is first approved in the 
Executive, or Cabinet, Council. The Legislative 
Council itself gets through most of its work in 
Select Committees, which amend or recast bills, after 
they have been brought in and published, in the light 
of reports made upon them by the officials in the 
provinces concerned. 

You must bear in mind, though, that the analogy 
with the Cabinet or the House of Commons is a 
false one in this particular : the Viceroy, subject to 
the approval of the Secretary of State at home, can 
override even the unanimous opinion of either Coun- 
cil. He is merely obliged, in that case, to give his 
reasons for so doing in writing. But in practice the 
members of the Council are bound to know so much 
more of the details of the business than the Viceroy 
does, that this power is very seldom, if ever, used. 

Under the Government of India are the Provincial 
Governments, which miniature the central authority. 
There are eight provinces — Madras, Bombay, Bengal, 

144 



The Rulers of India 

North- West Provinces, Punjab, Burma, Central Prov- 
inces, and Assam. The first two are still called 
presidencies, and get their Governors from home, in- 
stead of from the Civil Service ; but the distinction 
is an obsolete and insignificant one. The next four 
are ruled by Lieutenant-Governors, and the others by 
Chief Commissioners ; but here, too, the distinction 
is more nominal than essential. The Governors of 
Madras and Bombay, and the Lieutenant-Governors 
of Bengal and the North- West Provinces, are assisted 
by bodies similar to the Viceroy's Legislative Coun- 
cil. Each provincial Governor has a small staff of 
civil servants at his headquarters. Civil servants are 
also at the head of the divisions of each province and 
the districts of each division, while there is a large 
staff of what is called the Provincial Civil Service. 
These officers are not members of the Indian Civil 
Service, properly so-called, which is recruited by ex- 
aminations in England, and which, in virtue more of 
superior ability and force of character than of any 
privilege, fills most of the higher posts in the public 
service. The members of the provincial services are 
almost entirely native. Below them comes the sub- 
ordinate civil service — clerks, messengers, and the 
like — who are wholly native. 

The institution of the Provincial Civil Service has 
proved a fairly satisfactory solution of a difficult 
problem : how far is it wise or possible to employ 
natives in civil administration ? A few years ago the 

145 



The Rulers of India 

House of Commons passed a resolution ordering that 
examinations for the Indian Civil Service proper 
should be held in India as vi^ell as in London. There 
could hardly be a more childish misconception of the 
true reason of competitive examination. We do not 
want scholars to govern India so much as men and 
gentlemen of good physique, unimpeachable integrity, 
unbending strength of w^ill, abundant common-sense 
and tact. Only, as there are more candidates of this 
kind than there are vacancies, we examine them in 
Greek iambics and quaternions as the most convenient 
way of discriminating among them. The more 
necessary qualities we assume them — and rightly, as 
experience shows — to possess in roughly equal meas- 
ure. But we cannot assume that such natives of In- 
dia as would be likely to succeed in competitive ex- 
aminations would possess these qualities — rather the 
opposite. To allow them to compete in such exami- 
nations, whether in India or in London, is about as 
reasonable as to allow the passengers on a liner to 
draw lots for the privilege of navigating the ship. In 
the provincial services, on the other hand, promotion 
is by approved merit, and a native official who has 
shown his capacity can be advanced to any of the 
positions usually held by members of the Civil Service 
itself. 

Under the provincial Governors — except In Ma- 
dras, which does without the grade — are the Com- 
missioners. Each, rule a group of districts called a 

146 



The Rulers of India 

division. Under them are the district officers — 
variously designated in various provinces — who are 
the real working members of the Government. A 
district is the administrative unit of India; it is com- 
plete in itself, and its head is responsible for every 
branch of its working, almost for everything that 
happens in it. This is the case throughout India. 

If, therefore, you want to see the Government of 
India at its daily work, dealing with the people, rais- 
ing its taxes and spending them, toiling — as it is al- 
ways unselfishly toiling — for the benefit of the na- 
tives, and them alone, you must seek out the district 
officer. In a larger unit you will not see the actual 
work ; in a smaller, you will not see it all. The dis- 
trict officer has usually two or three members of the 
civil service under him. But, as a rule, not more 
than one of these is a very efficient helper ; the 
younger have yet to learn the vernacular languages 
and dialects — which are innumerable and infinitely 
various — and their duties generally. The district 
officer is the backbone of administrative India, 



147 



XVI 
THE DISTRICT OFFICER 

At the moment the camel deposited me at his 
camp he was hearing appeals from the orders of his 
subordinate magistrates. The furniture of the court 
consisted of a desk, all in clamps and joints and 
hooks for taking to pieces when camp is struck, and 
two chairs. Its officials were three native clerks, 
cross-legged on the floor with piles of papers and 
inkhorns, and a red-coated, gold-sashed orderly at the 
tent door. In the shadow of the tent snored another, 
also red-coated and gold-sashed, like all Government 
messengers. A little way off squatted a circle of bot- 
tomless-eyed brown men — some fat with gay mantles, 
some thin with wisps of calico — litigants, appellants, 
petitioners, policemen in dark-blue tunics, and prison- 
ers in irons. There floated in faint cries from the 
village, a quarter of a mile away, the pipe of birds and 
the guggle of camels. 

At the desk sat the Presence — British rule incar- 
nate in a young man in long boots and a green 
waterproof-khaki shooting-jacket, clean-shaven, with 
an eye and a mouth and a chin. Thus he rules, by 
himself, his kingdom of 5000 square miles and 
800,000 souls. 

148 



The District Officer 

" Roti Ram " says the cross-legged clerk on the 
carpet J "Roti Ram" bawls the beckoning orderly at 
the door. There appears, slipping ofF his shoes at 
the entrance, a sleek creature in a flowered cotton 
tunic, like the chintz in which ladies cover up their 
sofas. He scoops unctuously at the carpet and 
brings his hand thence to his turban; then bows 
his head and clasps his hands in the attitude of 
prayer. The clerk patters out a flowery rigmarole 
of mixed Arabic and Persian, blotted only by a few 
bare necessary disfigurements in the way of Hindi 
words, — -that is Hindustani, the official language of 
Northern India. When he has finished, the Dis- 
trict Oflicer raises his head and asks three questions 
in the vernacular; Roti Ram replies, with voluble 
self-abasement. Then the Sahib utters six words, 
ending with " Go." Roti Ram takes a scoop at the 
carpet, and, shuffling into his shoes, goes. 

He is a landlord, and had desired to evict certain 
of his tenants. They had applied to the British 
assistant to be made permanent, occupancy tenants, 
or, in the alternative, for compensation. Now the 
landlord appealed against the rate of compensation 
allowed; the assistant is young and new to the 
district, and had fixed it at a rate which his ex- 
perienced superior, knowing his district like a book, 
knows the land will not bear. Appeal allowed ; Roti 
Ram happy. 

" Mukkan Singh ! " " Mukkan Singh ! " A wisp of 

149 



The District Officer 

brown arm and leg In a dirty orange turban palpi- 
tates in, and clasps his hands. " O Cherisher of the 
Poor," he begins, and then falls to weeping. " Stop 
that," says the Cherisher of the Poor, with stern- 
ness ; he stops instantly, and in a voice of anguish 
pours forth his tale. A villain has taken away his 
wife and married her : he wants to prosecute them 
for bigamy. 

" Where did you marry your wife ? " 

" O Presence, here — no ; in Gurgaon — no ; it was 
in the native state of — but no ; the Presence will 
know that " 

" Where is she now ? " 

" O Presence, here — no ; in Gurgaon — no ; she was 
in the native state — but no ; my wife left my house, 
O my father and mother, and went first to Gurgaon, 
and there she and the man remained but a little 
while, and then — " And then Mukkan Singh's 
brain gives altogether, and he sobs limply. He is 
removed and set down at the tent door, and a native 
clerk with a soothing manner is set by him to extract 
his story in bits as his senses return. Eventually — 
Application for warrant to be made elsewhere ; 
Mukkan Singh slightly comforted. 

So they file in and out, one after another, con- 
firming the Persian proverb that gold, women, and 
land are the seed of all troubles. Presently they 
are all done with for the moment ; the sun is drop- 
ping down the sky, and their father and mother 

150 



The District Officer 

takes time for a cup of tea. But he is instantly 
back in his office again ; he has yet to hear the 
points submitted to him from the outlying parts of 
the district, besides a multitude of petitions. When 
you hear them, you begin to realise what a District 
Officer is. 

1. A peon, who was a Mussulman, went to serve 
a process in a remote Hindu village. There the na- 
tives detected him about to slay for his supper, with 
his official sword, a brood of young peacocks, and the 
defence of the sacred birds resulted in a free fight. 
The peon denied the impeachment with pained indig- 
nation : the fact was, he saw the boys of the village 
going about to slay the pea-chicks, and, knowing that 
Hindus held them sacred, was putting them into a tree 
for safety, when the villagers fell upon him. Note hy 
the local native authority — The peon is known to be 
fond of roast peacock, and is it likely that Hindu boys 
would kill the holy chicks ? ^estion^ What is to be 
done to this peon ? Peon dismissed. 

2. A lady whose son and son's estate are under the 
court of wards — " which is practically me," explains 
the District Officer — asks for money wherewith to 
celebrate the consummation of the boy's marriage. 
Recommended that he be declared of age and put in 
possession of his property. 

3. Ten native gentlemen of independent means 
have promised to subscribe for school prizes to the 
total amount of £1^ 2s. 8d. When it comes to buy- 

151 



The District Officer 

ing the prizes, only one of them can be induced to 
pay. What is to be done ? Nothing. 

4. A woman has accused a man of looting her 
house J it turns out he is her lover, and she adopted 
this device to conceal the fact from her husband. No 
charge. 

5. An old woman accused a man of stealing two 
pennyworth of green stuff from her field ; it turns out 
that, having a grudge against him, she has hit on this 
device to work it off, whereas in fact he took the 
stuff from his own field. No charge. 

6. Two Government orderlies have had their 
oflicial sashes three years and they are worn out; 
authority is sought to buy new ones. Granted. 

7. A headman of a village has sold his land , there- 
fore, according to law, he ought not to remain head- 
man, nor to collect the Government revenue, nor to 
receive his five per cent, commission thereupon. But 
the times are hard, and he has a brother, a fakir in 
Boondi, who will give him up his- land and thus re- 
qualify him. Allowed. 

8. A head-headman — one who is set over a group 
of villages, and gets one per cent, on the revenue 
raised therein, which is paid out of the revenue of one 
particular village — points out that, owing to hard 
times, the revenue of thife village has been suspended, 
and there is nothing to pay his commission with. 
May it be paid from the revenue of the others in his 
group ? Yes. 

152 



The District Officer 

9. A native magistrate has remanded a prisoner 
for fifteen days, whereas the law only allows a remand 
for fourteen. But on the fifteenth day a superior 
magistrate, who has power to try him, will return, and 
he will be saved the trouble and delay of a journey to 
the central town. Permitted. 

10. There is a leper at Chotapur ; what is to be 
done with him ? Look up the latest of Government's 
innumerable regulations on the point and act accord- 
ingly. 

11. Some prisoners in Jail for non-payment of 
fines allege that money is due to them for railway 
work at Hazirabad wherewith they could pay. Write 
and find out. 

12. On the salt-line — the old barrier across 
country where the salt-tax used to be collected, the 
land of which is still Government property — a tree 
has fallen down. May it be sold by auction ? It 
may. 

13. A sepoy on furlough has brought Govern- 
ment cartridges to his village, which is contrary to 
the Arms Act. Communicate with his regiment. 

14. A recruiting party enlisted two men in the 
jungles of a native state and brought them into the 
district, where they were found to be possessed each 
of a sword, contrary to the Arms Act. What is to be 
done with (a) the swords, (b) the recruits ? (a) Con- 
fiscated, (b) nothing. 

15. Certain villagers — having presumably quar- 

153 



The District Officer 

relied with the village accountant — demand an audit 
of the books of the village funds. Granted. 

1 6. May a headman attach a villager's buffalo in 
default of water-rate ? He is able to pay. Yes. 

17. May a headman attach standing crops in 
default of land-tax ? Yes — to the extent of the taxes 
due. 

18. Government granted 10,000 rupees for wells 
in this district. Hitherto, times being hard and 
demand for water great, it has only been granted for 
cheap kutcha wells (unbricked holes), which silt up in 
a couple of years. Only 2000 rupees have been 
applied for, and in seven weeks the unused part of the 
grant will have lapsed. May it be proclaimed that 
applications for pukka (bricked) wells will be received ? 
Yes. 

19. Saltpetre licence requested. Saltpetre is won 
by washing the earth that bears it and then evaporat- 
ing in the sun ; as salt is found with it, and salt 
is a strict Government monopoly in India, Gov- 
ernment controls the saltpetre industry to the ex- 
tent of charging two rupees for a licence. Licence 
granted. 

20. Question of liquor licence. Liquor can only 
be obtained from Government distilleries, and the 
price of licences acts as a check on drinking. This 
is a case of a joint-concession, of which one partner 
has quarrelled with the other and wants him ejected. 
Refused. 

154 



The District Officer 

21. May a registrar's clerk, who is the son of a 
worthy man and is well reported on, be confirmed in 
his appointment ? Yes. 

22. A question of tenant-right not contemplated 
in the Act. Decided on general principles of com- 
mon-sense. 

23. Gun licence applied for. Granted. 

24. Gun licence applied for in same village. 
Refused. 

24^. Two more applicants, who had intended 
applying in case of the others' success, go away. 

25. An old gentleman with flowing white beard 
applies for the right of sitting on a chair on public 
occasions. This privilege is only granted by Gov- 
ernment as an honour, and he produces a pile of 
testimonials from former Government officers. The 
sahib asks him, " District Board ke member hai ? " 
which is pure Hindustani. Recommended that it be 
granted. 

26. A shivering, threadbare, skin-and-bone grey- 
beard says that his land is about to be sold, in default 
of payment of debt, by the village usurer. Law is 
law : nothing can be done for him. 

27. Village messenger, whose salary is i6s. 
a-year, complains that his pay is los. 8d. in arrear. 
Advised to get work elsewhere, of which there is 
plenty. 

28. Village leather-worker, same salary, 9s. 4d. in 
arrear. Same advice. 

155 



The District Officer 

By now the huddle of petitioners outside the tent 
has melted away. There remains (29) a pile of papers 
ten inches thick to be signed. " Every one of these 
means the ruination of some poor devil," says the 
District Officer; they are notices of proceedings to 
recover debt. " But I can't do anything.'* 

And that will give you an idea of some of the 
things on which a District Officer had to keep his 
eye. Not all, for he has a light time just now : big 
questions like organisation of town councils, or water- 
works, or new canals, or famine-works, have let up 
for the moment. The Presence talks as familiarly of 
abolishing octrois and suppressing town councils as 
you do of engaging a housemaid. Nor yet does this 
give you an idea of all his work ; for before this chap- 
ter began he had ridden four hours from village to 
village. A most commendable regulation directs him 
to spend so many weeks a-year in camp, journeying 
from point to point in his five thousand square miles. 
When the day's work is over the sahib strolls into 
the sunset with a gun, as he has done every evening 
for years, till the sight of black-buck and partridge 
has grown odious to him. That moment an army of 
tent-pitchers hauls down the court, takes the bench to 
pieces, and the whole thing is ofF on camels and carts 
to the next stopping-place. We remain in the living- 
tent to dine and sleep, for it is still cold at night ; but 
there is a second living-tent already awaiting us at the 
next halting-place. We tumble out in the darkling 

156 



The District Officer 

twilight and start off through the country. At every 
cross-road there await the Presence salaaming villagers 
and more rule to be exercised. 

Here — dismounting by the wayside before a semi- 
circle of dark faces muffled in shawls against the 
bitter air of sunrise — he inspects the village registers, 
there checks the cattle-census returns, there refutes 
complaints of destitution by pointing to stacks of last 
year's fodder — which proves by one example the 
wisdom of going into camp — and at the next turning 
goes over the new village meeting-house. I saw that 
house — a huge double-towered building, higher than 
that of the next village, they tell you eagerly — faced 
with white plaster and adorned with wondrous frescoes 
of men and beasts and crinolined gods spearing dark- 
blue devils. On the roof above are revealed more 
esoteric studies, — a gentleman removing a lady's veil, 
and a white man drinking — O shame ! — out of a 
bottle. There the men meet in the hot-weather even- 
ings to smoke on the roof; here they put up the vil- 
lage guests at the expense of the village fund. At 
one place, by a rare exercise of self-help, they are 
using the village fund to pay the destitute to dig out 
the village tank. The same fund is used for judicious 
bribes to small officials when the village has a law- 
case. 

Through all this primitive hospitality, primitive 
corruption, primitive joy and sorrow, moves the 
Father and Mother of District, granting, refusing, 

^S7 



The District Officer 

punishing, fostering. Respected, feared, trusted, to 
his 800,000 he is Omnipotence. I should have men- 
tioned that he is thirty years old, and has been at this 
kind of work for six years. 



158 



XVII 
JUSTICE 

We have given India justice — every authority- 
agrees on that point ; and, whatever else we may have 
done or left undone, this alone, we tell ourselves, is 
enough to justify our rule. 

It is quite true, only it requires a little qualification. 
Most things in India, when examined, assume the 
features of a huge jest, and justice is like the others. 
We have offered India justice, only India will not 
have it. India prefers injustice. We have offered 
honest administration ; India prefers dishonest. So 
that administration to-day means the light of a few 
honest Europeans shining in a naughty native world. 
Justice, when you come to see it in action, means the 
guess work of shrewd European magistrates steering 
through billowy seas of perjury. 

From many cases in a district court let us take one 
or two. Din Mohammed and Abdul Kerim are 
charged, the one with stealing a down-calving buffalo, 
and the other with killing and skinning the same, well 
knowing it to have been stolen. The evidence against 
them has been heard already ; to-day is for their de- 
fence. They crouch, salaaming, into the tent, 
shackled together by the wrists, with the other end 

159 



Justice 

of the chain In the hand of a blue-tunlcked, khaki- 
breeched policeman. He is about half the size of 
the prisoners — two splendid fellows of six feet two 
or thereabout. Din Mohammed's demeanour is de- 
fiant : he has been here three times before. His blue- 
black moustache and beard bristle fiercely ; his shin- 
ing eyeballs are a splash in saucers of dazzling white. 
Abdul Kerim, inexperienced, thinks that a melting 
mood may better serve his turn : his crimson-turbaned 
head droops sideways like a peony in a shower, and 
his eyes are turned plaintively upwards. 

There are three witnesses for the defence. Each 
stands over six feet, each has a beard and moustache 
like horsehair and eyes like onyx ; they might all of 
them be blood relations to Din Mohammed — ^which 
is exactly what they are. They enter and stand with 
clasped hands and eyes directed unswervingly towards 
the top left-hand corner of the tent. Their story is 
simple and consistent. Din Mohammed bought the 
buffalo in their presence for seventeen rupees, and 
they solemnly swear that this is the truth. Every 
now and then one of the prisoners, standing also with 
folded hands and rubbing their bare toes together, 
throws in a word of encouragement or corroborative 
detail. Cross-examination brings out no discrepancy 
in their story : time, place, figures, names, tally ex- 
actly. And the last of them winds up : " O Presence, 
I have kept the Fast for forty years and never told a 
lie." 

i6o 



Justice 

A judge at home would have no more to say : ob- 
viously not guilty. In India, unluckily, there are one 
or two further points to be considered. As, first, that 
Din Mohammed is a landless man, and has probably 
never eaten meat in his life — much less killed a down- 
calving buffalo, which in a month or so would be 
giving twenty quarts of milk a-day. Second, that a 
down-calving buffalo costs at least forty rupees, and 
up to three hundred — not seventeen. And, third, 
that Din Mohammed has been convicted of this same 
offence three times already ; and that on each of these 
occasions exactly the same witnesses appeared on his 
behalf, including the Washington who never told a 
lie, and swore to exactly the same story. 

" Bring in the prisoners." As they rattle in, the 
magistrate looks up : " Din Mohammed, seven years; 
Abdul Kerim, six months." Out they go. A dis- 
trict magistrate has no time to address the prisoner at 
the bar and dilate on the enormity of his offence. 

That was a very simple case, and interesting only 
as illustrating the native idea of evidence. But some 
are brain-cracking perplexities. For example, a mag- 
nificently powerful Sikh is next brought in, his clothes 
blood-spotted, his jaw broken, and his mouth hid- 
eously on one side. As he enters he artistically 
drops off his turban, disclosing a big wound on his 
head, and bursts into lung-tearing sobs. When he is 
quieted, an equally superb Sikh, grey-bearded and 
patriarchal, steps in to testify against him. " Rushed 

i6i 



Justice 

up with a sword," he begins. " When ? " " The 
fifth of January." " Where ? " " In front of my 
house." " Who rushed up with a sword ? " " Jagta 
did." It is a further amiable peculiarity of the Indian 
witness that he begins his evidence in the middle, and 
all pronouns and adverbs and similar embellishments 
have to be dragged out of him by a corkscrew of cross- 
examinations. 

The case appears to be this. All the witnesses 
agree that the prisoner rushed up with a sword and 
assaulted the old man, that the old man's son rushed 
between and got a cut in the thigh, the which he dis- 
plays with triumph. Further, that the son then hit 
prisoner on the hand with a bamboo and got the sword 
from him — the sword lies on the tent floor, alive to 
testify the fact — and that the prisoner was thereupon 
given into custody. The flaw in their evidence is 
that, whereas it is obvious that the prisoner thereafter 
got a most tremendous thrashing, and was indeed half 
killed, every one of the witnesses denies with an oath 
that anything of the kind happened. On the other 
hand, the prisoner cannot account for the illegal 
possession of the sword, which is evidently a cast 
police sabre : he says it is not his, and that he never 
saw it before. And the civil surgeon — native — who 
examined the son's wound, reports that it could not 
have been inflicted by Jagta, but was probably manu- 
factured by the son himself. 

Now, five years ago, Jagta was concerned in abduct- 

162 



Justice 

ing the daughter of the old man. He and another 
were condemned, but having appealed before a native 
judge and paid him 1500 rupees, were acquitted. 
Since then Jagta has brought a criminal charge against 
the old man and his son, supported by abundant evi- 
dence, which was adjudged false and malicious, and 
for bringing which he was fined. The two parties 
will go on with their accusations and counter-accusa- 
tions for a generation. 

There are, therefore, two hypotheses. First, the 
old man's party may have fallen on Jagta and beaten 
him; then, to cover themselves, rushed off to the 
police, accused him of murderous assault, and bribed 
them to supply a cast sword to support the allega- 
tion. Second, Jagta may have actually made the at- 
tack, and got the unacknowledged thrashing in return ; 
and then his friends may have bribed the assistant 
surgeon to say that the son's wound v/as self-in- 
flicted. Both hypotheses are in the nature of native 
things probable ; only both cannot be true — and how 
in the world is the wretched magistrate to decide be- 
tween them ? 

And now you understand the nature of Indian jus- 
tice. The case is dirt-common, and quite typical. 
Of course the wretched magistrate has to take full 
notes of all the evidence, of which half must be, and 
all may be, false. Indian law allows great freedom of 
appeal — with the possible result that when, after years 
of trouble, the magistrate has caught the master cat- 

163 



Justice 

tie-lifter of his district, an inexperienced appellate 
judge sets him free again because the evidence appears 
equal on each side. In one case out of ten he may 
be right ; but who is to blame him when he is wrong ? 
To give India justice would demand second-sight. 
India loves litigation : the court is the ryot's parish 
council — as good as a circus. It would probably be 
wrong to say that the native does not appreciate hon- 
esty in his judges ; but he appreciates it mainly with 
the sporting notion that it is a good thing to be sure 
that the litigant who cheats best will win. Every day 
cases come into court in which every word of the 
evidence is carefully, lovingly fabricated beforehand. 
Prosecution and defence are alike masterly and elab- 
orate perjuries, for the native — especially in cases 
where, as usual, both sides are to blame — will never 
be content without improving on the truth. It is the 
morality of the country, and you live longer if you 
laugh at it than if you weep ; yet sometimes you get 
a case that is truly devilish. The false witness be- 
gins before the crime is even committed. In the dis- 
tricts about Peshawar especially, where murder is the 
equivalent of writing to the newspapers with us, men 
will go to the police, at intervals, for months, to point 
out that So-and-so hates Such-an-one, has threatened 
to kill him, is believed to be lying in wait for him. 
Sure enough, in the fulness of time, Such-an-one is 
found dead with a knife through his back, and So- 
and-so is arrested. But the real murderers were the 

164 



Justice |t 

men who had warned the police ; so that magistrates 
will hardly ever dare to convict a man lest he be an 
innocent victim, and murders have gone up about 
Peshawar to four hundred or so a-year. 

Not a single native is to be trusted. Many no 
doubt are impeccable ; but with instances of dishon- 
esty among the ablest and longest unsuspected, it is 
next to impossible to be sure of anybody. The truth 
is, that native opinion does not utterly condemn cor- 
ruption. The jail authorities encourage prisoners to 
write petitions that they may get backsheesh from the 
dealers who provide the Government paper. The 
police are notoriously corrupt, the officials are corrupt, 
the officers of the court are corrupt, the very native 
magistrates and judges are corrupt. A case is ad- 
journed and adjourned and adjourned, every time on a 
plausible pretext, for months ; meanwhile the judge's 
jackals are out in the villages hinting to the suitor 
that if he will but agree to this or that compromise, 
the cause shall be heard and settled at once. As a 
rule, they take bribes from each side, and then decide 
the case on its merits. The man of really scrupulous 
honesty takes the same present from each side, and 
then — just like our own Lord Bacon — returns the 
money to the loser. 

Only why, you ask, is this allowed to go on ? Be- 
cause, though everybody suspects, and hundreds of 
natives know, you cannot get a man to come forward 
and say, " I paid this magistrate such a sum," and 

i6s 



Justice 

prove it. Of course not, for the man who paid is 
usually the man who profits. It is one of the super- 
lative jests of India to see a superior tell the equiva- 
lent of a county court judge he strongly suspects him 
of taking bribes, and the learned gentleman sobbing 
on the floor and challenging anybody that has bribed 
him to come forward and say so, yet in no way re- 
senting the charge. But only last year one of the 
ablest native judges in the Punjab was found guilty of 
venality in its very grossest form. He had taken 
1500 rupees from Jagta and his friend; from the 
brother of a maharajah he had had as much as 60,000 
in one case. His cleverness was such that every one 
of his decisions looked plausible. His wealth, of 
course, was prodigious ; and, when the crash came, he 
was off to Pondicherry : much of his money was 
invested in native States, and bags of rupees or bars 
of gold were found hidden in the homes of profes- 
sional thieves. 

" Our pay," said a Government official — retired — 
" is but the chutni which we eat with our meat." 



166 



XVIII 

PROVIDENCE AND THE PARLOUR GAME 

Among the duties of a District Officer, in his gen- 
eral capacity of Father and Mother of the People, 
falls the inspection of anything in the nature of a 
public institution that he may happen to come across. 
In two days I had the honour of assisting at inspec- 
tions of a jail, a dispensary, a school, a public garden, 
a treasury, a police-station, a dak bungalow, the reg- 
isters of half-a-dozen villages, two Arab stallions, and 
a stud donkey. 

When you meet the Government of India in camp 
it seems the ideal of a single system adapted to a 
simple country. It appears to reside, not in ink and 
paper, but in men. The man knows his business and 
knows his own mind, and Government appears to 
work in a string of six-word orders delivered at the 
rate of a couple of dozen an hour. The Briton un- 
derstands and commands ; the native understands and 
performs ; work is done quickly and cheaply, and 
there is a responsible man to see that it is done. 

Unfortunately that is only half the fact. If that 
were all, India — provided only that its local rulers 
were both trustworthy and trusted — would be the 

167 



Providence and the Parlour Game 

best-governed country in the world. But there is an- 
other side. The rulers, for the most part eminently 
trustworthy, are only half-trusted. From that comes 
supervision, regulations, correspondence, clerks by the 
thousand, writing by the ream, red-tape by the league. 
The Government of India, in the one aspect the 
ideal organisation for work, becomes in the other the 
inevitable and gigantic joke — a cobweb of rules and 
checks and references, compared with which eight- 
pack Patience is simplicity and the House that Jack 
built terseness. 

As soon as you leave the tent and come under a 
Government roof it is this side of the matter that be- 
gins to unroll itself before you. At the police-station 
alone ten books are brought out for inspection. 
Every single thing that the police does is carefully 
written down, even to the cleaning of their Sniders. 
Every pill that goes out of the dispensary is similarly 
made a note of, together with the recipient's name and 
religion. At the school every attendance of every 
scholar is kept, together with records of all passes and 
failures and long reports from inspectors. Thus with 
everything. 

So far, of course, all is natural and indeed neces- 
sary. You would find almost as much paper covered 
in similar • institutions at home. In India, further- 
more, the details of administration must needs be 
largely in native hands, and of responsibility the or- 
dinary native official is neither desirous nor worthy. 

i68 



Providence and the Parlour Game 

Therefore he writes down questions in black and 
white, and his European superior gives him black and 
white answers. 

It is not only officials who fly to writing as a 
friendly shelter against responsibility. In all India 
you will hardly find a native who will take verbal in- 
structions. You send a peon with a letter : he will 
take no notice when you tell him where to go, but 
instead will waylay every European he sees in the 
street and hold out the letter to him, in hopes that the 
talismanic writing will find its destination for itself. 
When I first started forth into India I came on a na- 
tive doctor, or semi-doctor, on plague duty. His in- 
structions were to keep passengers from Bombay in a 
segregation camp. I assured him, and he must have 
known, that plague regulations did not apply to Euro- 
peans ; he replied that if I would kindly wait twenty- 
four hours on the ground at nowhere-in-particular he 
would telegraph to his official superior for instructions. 
When I eventually lost patience, and said I was going 
on, instructions or not, he asked if, at least, he might 
telegraph on the number of my ticket. I gave it 
him : at the sight of a regulation number he quite 
revived, and of course nobody heard any more of it. 
Similarly the guard of a railway train writes down the 
number of your ticket in his notebook — why. Heaven 
knows. Briefly, the whole ambition of the native is 
to leave off being a man and to become a sort of 
pneumatic tube ; and the sole qualification for the 

169 



Providence and the Parlour Game 

native public service is to be able to read and write 
and to know the way to the post-office. 

But, to go back to Government, the records of the 
police-station and the dispensary are meagre compared 
with those of the patwari^ or village accountant. This 
gentleman keeps a number of books, which together 
form the minutest record of the economic history of 
the village. He has a linen map — he lugs it out of 
his pocket like a very dirty handkerchief — which 
shows the boundaries, not only of the village lands, 
but of every field. In his records he puts down the 
area of land sown with each crop and the amount 
harvested. In another book he puts down the rent 
of each field and the land-tax, while any changes of 
ownership or of occupancy are likewise entered. 
Everything that the wit of man could hit upon as re- 
cordable is recorded. So long as the patwari does his 
duty — which he usually does, unless he is paid to do 
otherwise — Government has matter for an economic 
history of rural India beside which the collected 
works of Mr. Charles Booth would be a superficial 
pamphlet. 

To the British mind such a system is suspiciously 
reminiscent of the given moment at which every 
child in France is saying its multiplication table ; and 
you will ask. What is the use of it all ? Much. For 
the Government of India — you will hardly guess it 
from the Wedderburns of the age, but it is most true 
— is the tenderest-conscienced ruler in the world. 

170 



Providence and the Parlour Game 

Every thirty years It assesses the land revenue, v^hich 
is its principal source of income, and in this work the 
village registers are invaluable. They show, as nearly 
as experience can forecast the future, what the land 
can pay, and it is assessed accordingly. The theory 
in India has always been that the land is the State's, 
and that the State is entitled to the whole of the prod- 
uce after the cultivator has half-filled his belly from 
it. In British theory this right has relaxed. In 
Bengal and parts of the North-West Provinces it has 
surrendered its rights to zemindars by the Permanent 
Settlement, which cheats it out of its fair share in the 
prosperity of the country. Elsewhere the settlement 
is in the nature of a thirty-years' lease of the land, 
granted either to a village collectively, as landlord, or 
directly to the cultivator; and in this case it is con- 
sidered reasonable to take one-half of the net profit. 
But in practice the assessment is generally much 
lower. Sometimes blunders are made, and it is much 
higher. There is a story of a landowner who be- 
queathed all his land to the officer who had last as- 
sessed it — remarking that, as the sahib had taken all 
the produce, he might as well have the land itself. 
But in the main the settlements are equitable, and for 
that thanks are largely due to the patwari's register. 

Only Government is not content with the register. 
The settlement officer has also to furnish a most 
elaborate report, beginning with the district's history 
from the earliest times, telling you not merely what 

171 



Providence and the Parlour Game 

grows there and how much it fetches, but also the 
race of the people and their local superstitions, a 
great part of their language, and what they look like, 
and who has the right of sitting on a chair, and 
whether the post-office is also a money-order office, 
and how many people died of ruptured spleen, and 
what the irrigation system was in the reign of Au- 
rungzebe, and before there was any irrigation system 
at all what there was where the irrigation system now 
is, and the deuce knows what besides. 

If Government were content with that — it is only 
once in thirty years. But the curiosity of Govern- 
ment is insatiable and feverish. Every year the Dis- 
trict Officer has to make reports on every important 
branch of his administration — huge piles of foolscap 
an inch thick. If Government were only content 
with that — but there are a million subjects on which 
special reports have to be made. If a wretched babu 
clerk to a medical officer embezzles Government cash, 
it is the District Officer who really suffers ; for he has 
to write a special report — Sub-head No. 123,456,789 
— on defalcations of Government servants. If a 
member of Parliament asks a question in the House — 
purely to waste time, as like as not, or to get his 
name into the "Times" — the Secretary of State asks 
the Viceroy for the answer, and he asks the Lieuten- 
ant-Governor, and he asks the Commissioner, and he 
asks the District Officer, and he collects information 
from his native subordinates. He combines their an- 

172 



Providence and the Parlour Game 

swers into a report, and the Commissioner combines 
the reports of the District Officers, and the Lieuten- 
ant-Governor combines the reports of the Commis- 
sioners, and the Viceroy combines the reports of the 
Lieutenant-Governors, and sends the result home to 
Whitehall, which it reaches long after the man who 
"arted the inquiry has forgotten that he ever made it. 
And on the top of that some toy ruler in the 
Secretariat at Calcutta or Allahabad, or somewhere a 
thousand miles away, will have the idea to get a series 
of monographs on the home arts and industries of the 
people, or the natural history of the bullock, or the 
extent to which natives wear shoes. So the subject is 
served out to various wretched civil servants like an 
essay at school, and each writes a book about it which 
nobody ever reads. 

The people who mostly instigate this sort of thing 
are always talking to you about " the art of govern- 
ment " and " the way to rule men." It is not ruling 
men; it is a parlour game. Doubtless the informa- 
tion acquired is very interesting ; and if India were 
rich and had a superabundance of British officers with 
nothing better to do, it would be a most blameless 
and intelligent way of working ofF superfluous cash 
and the energy of the superfluous staff. But India 
is poor, and it has one trustworthy administrator to 
every three hundred thousand of its people. So that 
in the cities money goes for hundreds of babus to 
copy and register things that do not matter, to for- 

173 



Providence and the Parlour Game 

ward them and acknowledge receipt of same. And in 
the villages the Father and Mother, who should be go- 
ing in and out among his officials and his people, be- 
comes a parent who writes treatises on education while 
the children play in the gutter. The Presence might 
better be called the Absence. He must cease playing 
Providence to play the Parlour Game. 



174 



XIX 

THE FOREST OFFICER 

The elephant knows. When the mahout wants to 
get on to her neck, she takes him on her trunk and 
bends it till he can walk up her forehead. When 
you want to get on to her back, she lets down a 
hind-foot to make one step, and curls up her tail to 
make another. She knows that a branch she can 
walk under will sweep you off her back ; therefore 
she goes round, or, if that is not possible, pushes 
down the tree with her trunk as gently as you put 
down a teacup. At every ford she tries the bottom, 
at every bridge she tries the planks : she knows bet- 
ter than you do how much she weighs and what will 
bear her. 

Jerk, jerk, jerk- — she seesaws you at every step, for 
you are sitting on a blanket just atop of her shoulder. 
Now and again the mahout addresses her in a lan- 
guage, handed down from father to children, that only 
mahouts and elephants understand, or smites her over 
the head with the heavy, iron-hooked ankus. It falls 
with a dull thud on her hairy forehead ; it would crack 
your skull like an eggshell, but it hurts the elephant 
as a dead leaf would hurt you. Behind her ear you 

175 



The Forest Officer 

see a crevasse of raw flesh in the armour-plating of 
hide : that wound is kept open, and through it only 
can she be made to feel. She just tramples on, now 
tilted almost on to her head, now all but standing on 
her tail ; over the shallow rivers, along the rutted 
cart-tracks, till the sun begins to bake and the line of 
hills in front changes from a wash of blue to a clear- 
cut saw-edge of shaded greens and browns. 

Past a village of leaning mud, past a string of 
squeaking carts — the elephant knows the bullocks will 
shy, and tries to skirt round them : they shy none the 
less, and the cart twists on the yoke-pole and turns 
clean turtle. The driver is not in the least disturbed : 
time is plenty in India — jerk, jerk, on we go. Now 
we begin to climb the lowest slopes — the toes of the 
Himalaya, whose waists are girdled with clouds and 
whose heads look over the floor of heaven. We tilt 
up and down narrow paths, brush past mats of branch 
and thorn and creeper : now we are in the very forest, 
the native immemorial jungle. From the elephant 
you look over a sea of tossing greens curling into a 
yellow foam of young leaves, or flecked with eddies 
of rusty brown where the frost has bitten. Nearer 
are pavilions and cloisters roofed with slabs of blue- 
blushing creeper-leaf. Across the alleys dart sun- 
birds, gold-green dusted with bronze, or magpies 
flashing yellow-plush bodies under black-and-white 
wings, or tiny blue-satin kingfishers reflected in dia- 
mond cascades. Then a creaking wooden screech, a 

176 



The Forest Officer 

crackling in the underwood, and overhead, with his 
crested prow, his sea-purple side, his long wake of 
plumes, floats by in full sail the royal peacock. In 
the intervals the jungle is dead silent. 

Another rise, another elbow of clifF, and the ele- 
phant, plucking a tuft of grass to shampoo herself 
with, is kneeling down by a little plastered bungalow 
on a dry lawn. It is the forest lodge. Here, looking 
out and down to the blue steak of the river as it 
scrambles out of the hills and trundles the rafts of 
deodar-sleepers down to the railway, looking across 
to the scarred sides of the hills beyond, to the floor of 
plain on his right and the giant's stairway of mountain 
on his left, lives the forest officer. 

He stands nearer six feet six than six feet, and rides 
nearer fifteen stone than fourteen ; therefore, drawing 
the pay of a forest officer, he usually walks. In the 
corner of his bare-plastered living-room stand a rifle 
and gun, which he takes out when he walks, in order 
to persuade himself that he has his recreations. At 
his feet snores a retriever-spaniel, which he keeps that 
he may not forget how to talk English. His food 
comes out of tins, except the jungle-fowl and hares 
he shoots and the unleavened chapatties his servant 
bakes instead of bread. Religion in this region allows 
the shooting of pea-fowl, but because of religion he 
denies himself beef. He gets up two hours before 
dawn, that he may waste no daylight in beginning his 
work at the far end of the forest. After dinner he is 

177 



The Forest Officer 

too tired to read, though he loves books, and his 
opinions on them are those of a man who thinks when 
we are talking. As it is, he nods over the five-days- 
old " Pioneer '' • he cannot keep his eyes open after 
half-past eight. Thus he lives alone from month to 
month and year to year. His wife and children and 
friends are the young trees in the forest. Sometimes 
in the jungle he comes across another white man, who 
stays five minutes and talks English over a peg. 

If he wants to save his soul alive, he must save it, 
like three-quarters of the rest of them in India, by 
work. The work of the forest officer is strange 
enough to the ordinary Briton : there are forests of 
a sort at home, but no forestry to speak of. My 
friend knows nothing except forestry, he cheerfully 
alleges, and therefore he must cling to his present 
billet through solitude and fevers, or else starve. In 
France and Germany they have State forests — ten 
square miles to an officer with efficient rangers and 
guards, where the Indian officer has perhaps a thou- 
sand with hopeless natives. Eleven million acres- 
over a third of the area of England — are the domain 
immediately under the Indian Forest Department, and 
of late years Government has begun to make money 
out of them. 

The forest officer must save his soul by works, but 
also by faith. He differs from the other slaves of 
India in that they can reap the fruit of their labours ; 
he never. The district officer sees his people harvest 

178 



The Forest Officer 

their crops and Government garner its revenue ; the 
engineer watches his canal make fields out of sand. 
Of the trees the forest officer plants, the first vv^ill not 
be felled till he has left the service ; before the last is 
turned into revenue his very tombstone will be moss- 
grown. He plans by night and sweats by day to 
create what he will never see. Of all India's bonds- 
men she asks the greatest sacrifice of him ; of all she 
asks the best of their life, but of him she asks his 
very individuality. He must sink himself to be a 
mere connecting-link, a hyphen in the story of his 
wood, taking up that which was old before he was 
born, and passing it on to be still young when he is 
dead. Twenty rings in a log — and the life's work of 
a man ! 

It is his to follow the working plan. A forest, you 
understand, is so much national capital, and, like other 
capital, it must be made to bear interest. If you cut 
down all your timber, your capital is gone, and your 
children will want for sleepers and window-frames and 
firewood — that is what naughty rajahs do. If you 
fell nothing, you are wrapping your talent up in a 
napkin. The working plan is designed to draw the 
annual increment from the forest and to leave the 
principal untouched. The trees in a particular wood 
take, we will say, a hundred years to reach maturity ; 
then, if the wood is of a thousand acres' area, you 
fell ten acres each year. As you cut down you sow 
again ; so that at the end of each year's fellings the 

179 



The Forest Officer 

forest is divided into a hundred ten-acre compartments 
varying in age from nothing to ninety-nine. 

Simple enough so far j but so far the forest officer's 
work is only a bit of paper. There are a thousand 
complications. Some young trees v^^ill not grow ex- 
cept in the shade of others, which shelter them from 
sun or frost or wind ; then you cannot simply cut 
down the forest in strips. It may be that part of the 
wood is on a slope, and to clear it altogether would 
untie the binding roots and call down a landslip. In 
such cases you must have the trees of different ages 
mixed. Then, again, there are such things as sapling 
forests, which grow from the stools of felled trees and 
not from seed j these will be cleared at regular inter- 
vals, say, of twenty years — a less impersonal business 
for the forest officer, for he can actually see his forest 
grow from year to year. 

Whatever the plan, there is only one course for 
him. Experts argue theories of planting or thinning : 
he must go out into the forest and look at the trees. 
No two cases for planting, for thinning, will be ex- 
actly alike, because no two trees out of all the millions 
are : he must go out and judge. So out we will go, 
under the beating sunshine. First along the fire- 
lines, where the ground has been cleared to a width 
that flames will hardly leap over : the cutting of fire- 
lines around and within the forest is the first pre- 
caution of the conservator. In this forest it was at 
one time neglected ; hence crooked trees which have 

i8o 



The Forest Officer 

had their sap frizzled up one year and have budded in 
another direction the next ; now they will never make 
good logs if they grow for ages. Then we turn up a 
nullah — a mad torrent in the rains, now a scrunching 
ladder of pebble and boulder. Then aside into the 
forest towards a sweet savour of wood-smoke : here 
are half-a-dozen squat hillmen round their earth- 
banked charcoal furnaces. They asked the other day 
for new axes, and the officer inquires, in their Him- 
alaya dialect, if they have got them yet. " No, O 
Presence," says the monkey-whiskered headman. 
The ranger had been told to serve them out, and has 
not done it. Then ofF through the long grass that 
brushes your ears, breaking through tangles of bush, 
dodging under branches, wriggling over meshes of 
creeper; a distant tapping sharpens into the chock- 
chock of axes, then comes a burst of sunlight, and we 
are in a half-open glade where coolies are felling and 
cross-cutting. 

This particular work was reported by the ranger as 
finished three weeks ago ; it is still going on. And 
there you fall once more across the maddening, be- 
numbing clog of all work in India — the native sub- 
ordinate. In the law-court it is his dishonesty that 
most strikes you : here it is his indolent incapacity. 
And, indeed, if you cannot get good native magistrates 
and clerks, how shall you look for good rangers ? The 
ranger is probably a bunnia's son : that shopkeeper- 
usurer sees that education brings a livelihood, and 

i8i 



The Forest Officer 

educates his son for the public service. Such as are 
not good enough for desks in the civil service go to 
the Forest School at Dehra Dun, and presently are 
fledged rangers. For centuries the rangers' fathers 
have been sitting on the counter of a shop, sticking 
their fingers into a pile of sugar and sucking them : 
w^hat should the ranger do in a forest ? He hates the 
place and everything about it. Why should he walk 
over a lot of beastly stones, through a lot of beastly 
prickles ? Then in the day it is hot in the forest, and 
in the morning he cannot go out without his food. 
Why, indeed, should he be asked to walk at all ? To 
walk is an indignity in India. 

So he ambles his pony along the fire-line every few 
days, and leaves the inside of the forest to the foresters 
and the guards and the coolies and God. And when 
his officer asks him what has been done, he draws on 
his voluble imagination. The ranger in this case had 
ridden within twenty yards of the fellings every day — 
or said he had — for weeks ; he had never taken the 
trouble to turn in and see how the work was really 
being done. 

A few yards further the beat of axes suddenly 
ceased behind a bush, and was succeeded by the buzz 
of a saw. A turbaned head appeared, watching our 
approach through the boughs ; when we reached the 
spot, two coolies were cross-cutting a log, and a 
forester sprang up in great confusion, bare-headed. 
The meaning of that little comedy was obscure to me, 

182 



The Forest Officer 

but plain to the expert. The man had been ordered 
to make his coolies use the saw for cross-cutting, 
which they, disliking, had prevailed on him to let 
them hack away with the axe. When he saw the 
Presence coming he gave warning and they flew to 
the sawj and to prove he had not been keeping Cave 
he knocked off his puggari, without which no self- 
respecting native would ever appear before a superior. 
With an air of bashful confusion he rewound the 
turban and humbly pointed out that he was. making 
them use the saw. 

Thus native assistants assist. The white man is 
out in the cold, dead hours before dawn, when the 
beasts are gone to sleep and the birds are not yet 
awake, when the very trees doze and the forest is a 
cavern of black silence, stirred only by the plump of 
heavy dewdrops on to the decaying humus below. 
The natives are in bed; and when the white man 
comes in back-broken at sunset he has two hours of 
asking why they did not do their work and of doing 
it for them. By this means, despite the neglect of 
many generations, the forests are slowly filling up 
with straight, young trees, and the bookshops with 
works on the gratifying efficiency of our native public 
services. That is exactly India. 



183 



XX 

THE CANAL 

No rain had fallen for the better part of six months, 
and the snows were as yet unloosened about the 
shoulders of the Himalaya. Out of the foothills the 
Jumna issued on to the endless level, like a thread of 
blue water on a broad belt of dead-yellow sand and 
round-worn pebble. Over and under and through 
scrambled the scanty trickle — a profitless thimbleful, 
you would say, to the vast plains and dry-lipped 
deserts below. 

Following it through the thickets and over the 
stones, you come to a road raised on a long embank- 
ment ; and following that, you find it presently closes 
in on the river. The stream, confined on this side, 
appears to gather weight, and slides along the more 
swiftly, as if making up its mind to a purpose. 

Then suddenly you look ahead — and there is no 
more Jumna ! It has stopped — disappeared. Across 
its broad bed, with pier and buttress, bridge and battle- 
ment, runs a long dam, relentlessly solid. Between 
the piers you see double flood-gates, each with an 
upper and a lower leaf, and a travelling winch on rails 
above to draw them up. But at present they are all 

184 



The Canal 

shut down, and the stream pulls in vain against that 
curb. Beyond it there is still the broad bed of dead- 
yellow sand and round-worn pebble — but only a feeble 
ooze through chinks, a puddle and a gutter-runnel of 
water struggle to lick over it. What on earth has be- 
come of the Jumna ? 

Next moment you see. Before you, along the right 
bank, is another weir with many piers and a broad 
road over it, double flood-gates, and a travelling-winch. 
The river, now bolting outright, swerves round a 
curved revetment, rears back from the dam in its front, 
and plunges madly through the arches of the other. 
Under the weir it is a lather of foam ; a hundred 
yards beyond it is in hand again, galloping with a swift 
and solid momentum between its narrower banks. 
The Jumna has ceased to be the wild stallion of a 
river J it is broken to man's service — bitted and har- 
nessed into a canal. 

From now on it has a double use : it is a highway 
where there was little road and no railway, and it is a 
perpetual spring of fertility where there was only sand 
and drought. In early summer, when the melting 
snows bring it down in shouting spate from the 
mountains, the gates are opened in the transverse 
weir, and it tears along its natural bed as well as along 
the canal. When the water rises above the lower 
leaf of the gates the upper can either be raised to let 
it off or kept lowered to hold it in place. It can be 
held up at the transverse weir and driven down the 



The Canal 

canal, or it can be held up at the lateral weir and 
eased off down the natural bed. 

And it takes some regulating, as the white-bearded 
engineer will tell you. He is simple and courteous 
and very keen, even after thirty uncomplaining years 
of canal work — now shiver, now sweat, and always 
work and anxiety. It is at posts like this you meet 
the non-commissioned ranks of British India — like 
this man, living with a working wife, bringing up 
children with difficulty, pinching the not over-liberal 
pay to squeeze out the expense of summers in the 
hills. Such .men — there are hundreds of them on 
canals and railways, in engine-rooms and fitting- 
sheds — are not the least heavily-burdened of the slaves 
of India. They hunger for Camden Town as the 
others hunger for St. James's Street ; but there is no 
three-yearly privilege-leave for them. Their chil- 
dren must be brought up in India or not at all ; and 
to be country-bred in India is good neither for mind, 
body, nor estate. In big stations there may be a club 
for them, and tennis with sergeants' daughters ; more 
likely they will be pushed away where there is a white 
superior to talk to six times a-year and a white equal 
never. If you come across such, and be expected, 
you will find the good man in a new white topi, and 
the good lady in an old silk gown, and tea and Hunt- 
ley & Palmer's biscuits. Sit down and talk : you 
seldom have such a chance to do a good deed without 
any virtue of your own. 

i86 



The Canal 

So here, in his little bungalow, alone — the higher 
ranks of Public Works Engineers are few, and the 
few are here to-day, and at the other end of the canal 
to-morrow, and dead of enteric the next day — keeping 
his accounts, commanding his coolies, sits the white- 
bearded engineer, and governs the river Jumna. 
When the floods come down it is anxious work, for 
it needs some masonry to stand against that tugging, 
snorting strain. It takes some regulation to prevent 
the torrent from savaging banks and bottom and 
swallowing up gates and travelling-winch and piers 
and all. To get due warning of such onslaughts they 
have just laid a telephone-wire miles up into the 
hills : here is a gauge which, when the water rises to 
a given height, automatically rings a bell at the head 
works below. 

Even now, when there is a bare three feet of water 
on the sill, there is plenty of devil in the Jumna. 
The four natives who man your boat row as you 
might know that natives would — a slice in, a languid 
scoop, and a good rest between the strokes ; yet you 
race down, and the boat will have to go back by bul- 
lock-cart. You soon forget that you are navigating a 
canal, for this is as broad as the Thames below Folly 
Bridge, and curbed with rough stone jetties and 
streaked with cross-currents into hills and valleys of 
water like the very Rhine. Now your boat bump- 
bumps against the bottom, now spins round a head- 
long corner, now kicks her rudder in the air and digs 

187 



The Canal 

her nose down a sliding cataract. Now you are 
caught and all but hurled against a raft of sleepers ; 
for the canal is a main highway of the timber trade. 
Next you coast round a big island, where tulip-trees 
mosaic the intense blue with black leafless boughs and 
scarlet blossoms, where tribes of puff-billed water- 
fowl, half-duck, half-cormorant, jump off the branches 
and flap heavily towards the long spear-grass above 
the sand-shoals. Here is a village alive with calves 
and staring brown faces ; here a soulless flat of poor 
pasture, where the canal is swilling great fids of bank ; 
here another weir-bridle across the still restive stream ; 
below it, a shoot of beryl-green water and snow-white 
foam into soberer, profounder reaches below. 

So you could float for days, with the water-air cool 
on your skin and the water-rustle drowsy in your ear. 
But wake up : this is not Nuneham or Ship- 
lake ; this is hard business. This Western Jumna 
Canal is part of perhaps the most original and benefi- 
cent piece of engineering in the world. It flows thus 
along the v/atershed between the Ganges and Indus 
basins for over a hundred miles, giving out water into 
a gridiron of channels that lead it to the checkered 
fields, till at last what is left trickles back to its mother 
Jumna at Delhi. A second branch of it heads out 
the best part of two hundred miles to Sirsa and Hissar 
and the sands that fringe the Bikanir desert, where 
the year's rain is less than twenty inches, and gener- 
ally fails at that, and two crops out of three must 

i88 



The Canal 

sponge on the canal or die of thirst. This pleasant 
river of tulip-trees and water-fowl spells life or death 
two hundred miles away. 

This is only one of the great canals with which 
British rule has turned flood into steady moisture and 
desert into corn-land, has mitigated bad years and 
filled to overflowing the abundance of good. This 
particular Western Jumna Canal, it happens, was 
there before we came : an Emperor of Delhi — Feroz 
Shah, in the reign of our Edward III. — cut it and 
planted it with trees. Only his engineer made the 
tiny oversight of leading it along the line of drainage 
instead of the watershed, so that wheels and buckets 
and oxen were needed to prevent it from drying the 
land instead of wetting it. Left derelict till our time, 
it was then realigned; and its perfected principle 
was applied to nearly all the great rivers of Northern 
India. 

The principle is briefly this. The rivers have eaten 
out low, narrow valleys for themselves ; so that an 
ordinary dam would not be enough to raise the waters 
to the upper lands beyond the valleys, while simple 
channels could not reach them at all except at points 
low down the river's course : you would have to take 
off cuttings and lead them over miles of country be- 
fore they could begin their work. The plan, there- 
fore, has been hit on of intercepting the whole bulk 
of the rivers as soon as they enter the plains, and 
carrying it to the watershed that runs parallel with the 

189 



The Canal 

course of the streams : thence, by gravitation, It dis- 
tributes itself. Of these canals the Jumna sends out 
three — one eastward, one westward from Tajawallah to 
Delhi, and* another from Delhi to Agra. The Ganges 
is intercepted at Hurdwar, whence four thousand 
miles of main and branch lead it back to the natural 
bed at Cawnpore ; the stream that gathers from tribu- 
taries below Hurdwar is again taken up and sent to 
reinforce the original canal. In the Punjab the Ravi, 
the Beas, the Sutlej, and now the Chenab, have been 
similarly shed abroad on to waste places ; on the lat- 
ter especially colonies have come from congested dis- 
tricts to land-grants in what till now was desert. Of 
the great rivers of the north, only the Jhelum and In- 
dus remain untapped. 

These works of irrigation are brilliant, effective, 
popular, and — the crowning grace of public works — 
they pay. It was worth the while of Government to 
make them, even if it were not a father's duty, for 
the increased land-revenue they bring in ; but, apart 
from that, they actually pay by the water-rates levied 
from the owners whose fields they give upon. In 
each village a water-registrar, corresponding to the 
land-registrar, keeps the account of the fields Irrigated, 
and the headman collects the rent. The Punjab canals 
already pay over six per cent., though the Chenab 
works are but just completed; the North- Western 
Province gets about the same ; the patriarchal West- 
ern Jumna yields nine. 

190 



The Canal 

That is good hearing ; the idea of charity in Gov- 
ernment is hateful to well-balanced minds. But for 
the true eulogy of Indian irrigation you must go to 
the cultivator. Forms of Government the cultivator 
neither knows nor recks of; even justice he does his 
best to clog with perjury ; but he understands and ap- 
preciates water on the land. Go into any village and 
mark the difference between this field and that — the 
dense, long-strawed, full-eared barley ; the dark, 
thick-podded rape ; the dense blue-flowering gram- 
pulse — on one side : the stunted, bloomless blotches 
— is it meant for crop or fallow ? — on the other. 
Water is scarce just now ; seven or ten days of full 
canal, then seven or ten of dry, is the usual alterna- 
tion. The ryot grumbles on the dry days, as tillers 
of the soil will ; but every village has a grey-beard 
old enough to remember what happened when winter 
rains failed in the past — in the years before the sahibs 
bridled the river and brought it to the village gate. 
And on the full days — go out at evenfall and see the 
ryot naked to mid-thigh scraping entrances in his lit- 
tle embankments with his antediluvian hoe. First 
one, then another, rod by rod, till the whole field is 
soaked. Listen to the glug-glug of the water as the 
last compartment gets its douse, and look at the great 
peace on the ryot's face. You can almost hear his 
soul glug-glugging with the like satisfaction. 



191 



XXI 

THE SHRINE OF THE SIKHS 

The Sikhs are the youngest of the great powers of 
India. A kind of Hindu Protestants, their Luther 
arose about 1500 to fulminate against caste and the 
worship of idols. Instead of Shiva and Kali, they 
worship their Bible, which is called the Granth. 
They abhor tobacco, and it is impiety to shave or 
cut the hair. Sometimes, when a Sikh plays polo, 
you may see it come undone and wave behind him 
like a horse-tail. From Puritans they turned to 
Ironsides, praying and fighting with equal fervour, 
wearing an iron quoit in their turbans, partly as a 
sign of grace, and partly as a defence against a 
chance sword-cut. 

For some three hundred years they fought the 
Mussulmans, Mogul or Afghan, for the dominion of 
the Punjab, and won it in the end. The Mussul- 
mans tortured the Sikh teachers to death with their 
families ; the Sikhs sacked and massacred in return. 
The Mussulmans took Amritsar, blew up the temple 
of the Granth, and washed its foundations in the 
blood of sacred cows ; the Sikhs took Lahore, blew 
up the mosques, and washed their foundations in 

192 



The Shrine of the Sikhs 

the blood of unclean swine. Fanatics and heroes, 
they lived only for the holy war, and became the 
barrier of India against the Mussulman tribes of the 
North- West. At last, in 1823, ^^^ Sikhs were 
united under Ranjit Singh into the greatest power 
of India. But he died in 1839 ; four wives and 
seven concubines were burned with him, and you 
can see their tombs under marble lotuses in Lahore. 
Ten years later the second Sikh War was over, and 
the Punjab was British. If the Sikh rule was short, 
their battles have ever been long. 

The later history of the Sikhs — how kindly they 
accepted British rule, which has still treated their 
religion with more than tolerant respect ; how they 
supplied and supply to-day noble regiments to our 
army ; the splendid services they rendered in the 
Mutiny, but a decade after their conquest; the un- 
swerving gallantry and devotion which they have 
displayed on every field of honour, — all this is 
part of the military history of the Empire. The 
very officers of Gurkha and Pathan and Dogra regi- 
ments admit that the Sikh is the ideal of all that is 
soldierly. 

Ranjit's capital was Lahore, but the holy city has 
ever been Amritsar. " The Pool of Immortality," it 
means, and here in the centre of the pool is the 
Golden Temple. In its present form it is not yet 
a century old — quite an infant in India. Amritsar, 
indeed, is full of new things ; for, as it is the Mecca, 

193 



The Shrine of the Sikhs 

it is also the Manchester of the Punjab. Carpets 
and shawls and silks are manufactured there, or 
brought in by merchants from Persia and Tibet, 
Bokhara and Yarkand. Here you can see modern 
native India untainted by Europe. 

Amritsar wears an air of solid prosperity. Not in 
the least like the manufacturing towns we know, 
lacking the machinery of Bombay or Calcutta, it 
neither shadows its streets with many-storeyed 
factories nor defiles its air with smoke. But it 
wears a uniform and thriving aspect, as of a town 
with a present and a future rather than a past. 
The Bond Street of Delhi is a double row of de- 
cayed mansions propped up by tottering booths ; the 
houses of Amritsar are middle-sized, regular, stably 
built of burned bricks, neither splendid nor ruinous. 
The looms clatter and whir in the factories, and the 
merchant bargains between the whiffs of his hookah 
in his shop, and Amritsar grows rich in a leisurely 
Indian way, unfevered by Western improvements. 

To the Western eye it is unenterprising and rather 
shabby. The stable comfort of Amritsar stops short 
at the good brick walls; inside, the shops are bare 
brick and plaster. There is nothing in the least 
imposing about it. " Chunder Buksh, Dealer," says 
one placard, and it would be hard to say what else 
he could call himself; for his stock seems to con- 
sist of one fine carpet, some brass pots, and a towel. 
Above him is " Ali Mohammed, Barrister-at-Law," in 

194 



The Shrine of the Sikhs 

a windowless, torn-blinded office, which you would 
otherwise take for the attic of Chunder Buksh's 
assistant. But compared with the rest of India, 
Amritsar is a model of wellbeing. It is dusty, but 
otherwise almost clean; the streets, of course, are 
full of bullocks and buffaloes, but it seems rare that 
animals share their bed with men; there are plenty 
of people all but naked, but it is rather from choice 
or religious enthusiasm than of necessity. The 
trousered ladies, strolling with trousered babies on 
their hips or smoking hubble-bubbles on shop 
counters, wear silver in their blue-black hair, pearls 
in their noses, gold in their ears; they jingle with 
locked-up capital. Finally, there is a Jubilee statute 
of the Queen, and a clock-tower for all the world 
like an English borough's. But besides these and 
the Government offices and the railway-station there 
is hardly a whisper from the West in the town; 
and in Amritsar you begin to conceive a new respect 
for India. 

The stream in the streets sets steadily towards the 
Golden Temple. From the heavy-browed city gate 
to the holy pool the winding alleys are splashed with 
all the familiar hues — orange outshining lemon and 
emerald throttling ultramarine. Following the stal- 
wart, bearded pilgrims, in the midst of the city of 
shopkeepers you suddenly break into a wide square : 
within it, bordered by a marble pavement — white, 
black, and umber — a green lake dances in the sun- 



The Shrine of the Sikhs 

light ; and in the midst of that, mirrored in the pool — 
you look through your eyelashes, for the hot rays fling 
back sevenfold-heated, blinding — gleam walls and roofs 
and cupolas of sheer gold. 

A minute or two you blink and stare, then you 
see that it is a small temple on an island with a cause- 
way leading to it from under an arch. And after the 
first blink and stare your notions of beauty rise up and 
protest against it. The temple is neither imposing by 
size nor winsome by proportion. It has two storeys 
— the lower of marble, inlaid, like the marble of Agra, 
with birds and beasts and flowers, but with none of 
Agra's grace and refinement ; all above it is of copper- 
gilt. Above the second storey rises something half- 
cupola, half-dome, but it is not in the middle ; there 
are smaller cupolas at the side overlooking the cause- 
way, and others smaller still at the far side. The 
whole temple is smaller than St. Clement Danes, and 
a little building has no right to be irregular. If the 
Taj Mahal, you say, which is three times this size, 
can take the trouble to be symmetrical — Well, if this 
is the masterpiece of modern India — As for the gold, 
it blinds you for the first moment and amuses you for 
the second ; but you might as well ask beauty of a 
heliograph. 

Nevertheless, do not go away, for you will hardly 
see anything more Indian. Outside the gate they 
show you a Government ordinance that everybody 
must either conform to the religious customs of the 

196 



The Shrine of the Sikhs 

place or forbear to indulge his curiosity ; you bow, and 
a bearded giant, who might be a high-priest for 
dignity, takes off your boots and ties on silk slippers 
instead. You leave your cigar-case behind you: 
tobacco must not defile the holy place. Then, be- 
hind a white-bearded policeman — who performs the 
triple function of guiding, preventing you from doing 
anything impious, and clearing worshippers out of the 
way before you — you start forth to see. 

The pilgrims shuffle on eagerly round the pavement 
to the great gate before the causeway. On a gilt 
tablet, in English and Punjabi, stands the record of a 
miracle : how that a great light from heaven fell before 
the holy book, and then was caught up into heaven 
again, whence the learned augured much blessing 
upon the British Raj. Past the gate they press with- 
out turning the head, though it is carved and pictured 
over every inch. On one side of the entrance a 
marble tablet shows the legend XXXV Sikhs and 
something in Punjabi. From the gate you issue on 
to the causeway. It also is flagged with marble, and 
lined with gilded lamp-posts ; but the lamps above the 
gold are that crass-blue and green-coloured glass of 
the suburban builder, and more than one hangs 
broken. So you come to the sanctuary itself — a 
lofty chamber with four open doors of chased silver. 
Within sit three priests on the floor, under a canopy 
of blue and scarlet, before a low ottoman draped in 
crimson and green and yellow. The high-priest, 

197 



The Shrine of the Sikhs 

eagle-eyed and long black-bearded, reads continually 
in a loud voice from the Granth j beside him sits one 
with a gilt-handled wisk and fans the sacred book. 
At another side sit two musicians : one twangs a sort 
of one-stringed mandoline, one thrums a tom-tom. 
Before the Granth lies a cloth ; and each believer, 
crouching in, flings on it flowers or cowries or copper 
coins for his offering. To the white man they bring 
what looks like a diy half-orange or candied citron, 
only white ; it is made of sugar, and the white man 
responds with the offering of a rupee. The walls 
about this strange worship blaze with blue and red 
and gold in frets and scrolls and flower-tendrils; 
above are chambers and galleries of the same and 
studded mirrors ; in one more than holy room are 
brooms made of peacocks' feathers wherewith alone it 
may be swept. 

That is the great shrine of all ; but there is much 
else. All round the lake are palaces of stone and 
white marble belonging to the great Sikh chiefs who 
came here to worship. Before them, on the pave- 
ment, men squatting under canvas screens hawk 
flowers — lotus, jasmine, marigold, or scabious — to be 
offered before the Scripture. In one of the palaces, 
which matches the temple with a gilt dome of its own, 
you see a glass case ; within it, under crimson silk, 
rest the sword and mace of some old Sikh Boanerges, 
mighty in prayer as in battle. Then there is a tower 
temple of eight storeys, dedicated to a bygone saint 

198 



The Shrine of the Sikhs 

and miracle-worker, the lower chamber aflame with 
paint and gold. As the policeman enters he touches 
the step with his finger; a woman in violet trousers 
flings a flower on to a cloth and ottoman like that of 
the central shrine ; a woman in green-and-gold 
trousers places a bread-cake before it and lays her 
forehead on the marble sill ; others grovel and sham- 
poo it with their hands. The next thing you come 
to is a plain shed with a dynamo that supplies the 
shrines and gardens with electric light. After that a 
group of naked fakirs, powdered white with ashes, 
with long mud-matted hair and mad eyes. Then a 
door, fast closed and seeming to lead nowhither, with a 
tiny wreath of marigolds hung on it. 

Everywhere the same grotesque contradictions — 
splendour and squalor, divinity and dirt, superstition 
and manliness. The Western mind can make noth- 
ing of it, cannot bring it into a focus. You simply 
hold your head, and say that this is the East, and you 
are of the West. In the treasury above the gate are 
silver staves and gilt maces, canopies of gold and 
diadems of pearls and diamonds. In the sacred, 
putrid lake rot flowers. A fakir standing before an 
enclosure drones in a full voice words you do not un- 
derstand, like a psalm without any end to it : the 
refrain, after every half-dozen words, sounds like 
" Hullah hah leay." Inside the shrine the high-priest 
never ceases to intone the Granth, nor the other priest 
to fan it, nor the musicians to tinkle and thrum ; and 

199 



The Shrine of the Sikhs 

in and out that holy place fly clouds of pigeons, 
perching on the canopy and fouling the growing pile 
of offerings before the ottoman. At every turn you 
come on little shrines with books on silken cushions 
and prostrate adorers. A calf, unchecked, is trying to 
lick the gold off the great gateway. 



200 



XXII 
ON THE BORDER 

India ends with the mountains as suddenly as it 
began from the sea. Out of the stretching plain, in 
which you could lay down Great Britain and Ireland 
and France and then lose them, you draw into a nar- 
rowing valley. Blue hills shepherd it on either 
side, not high, but rising abruptly out of the level ; 
over their heads, deep back, lean mounting sheets of 
perpetual snow. 

On the tongue of the valley stands Peshawar. It has 
stood sentry there ever since cities were, looking for- 
ward through the teeth of the hungry mountains, look- 
ing back to the gullet of the fat plains. The mountains 
are lean and swift and bloody j the plains are gorged 
and lazy and timid ; the bases of the hills are the line 
between, and it is only one stride over it. That curl- 
ing zigzag of smoke up the hillside is the Khyber, 
which has belched horde after horde to fatten on the 
corn and oil of India. On the verandah, where the 
grave merchant spreads for your approval the carpets 
of Penjdeh and the silks and velvets of Bokhara; in 
the trim garden of the club-house, where children are 
playing with shuttlecocks — ^you are just an hour from 

201 



On the Border 

the rocks where without armed guard no camel-load 
is safe from looters, and where stranger or native 
alike is shot in the back for his rifle. 

Peshawar city is almost as old as the hills, but, in the 
true spirit of the border, it makes no enticing show of 
riches. It has been sacked and sacked and sacked 
again, and looks as if it expected to be sacked anew 
to-morrow. The junction of a skein of trade-routes, 
it looks as poor and bare and crowded as the most 
miserable village. It is one huge caravanserai, a mart 
wherein half Asia bargains for riches that must be 
enjoyed in safety elsewhere. 

So that native Peshawar is like no other town in 
India. There is nothing Indian in its aspect, nothing 
Afghan nor Persian nor Tartar : it is merely Eastern. 
The bazaars and houses are packed as tight as they 
can stand. Its shops are bare, even for oriental shops 
— square, naked cupboards, three feet above the street, 
where the trader unrolls his stuffs, kneads his dough, 
grinds his grain, puff's his blowpipe into the charcoal, 
or hammers his sheet-metal into bowls and pitchers. 
The houses are naked mud on naked wooden frames, 
neither painted nor carved — just places of shelter, and 
no more. The mosques are no more than places of 
prayer for a safe journey : you turn in the street at 
sunset and see a row of a dozen men swaying and 
kneeling in a three-walled recess no bigger than a 
tramcar. Peshawar's only public buildings are the 
fort, heaving up its huge mud walls on one side, and 

202 



On the Border 

the old palace with its watch-tower on the other. 
From it you look over the city — compact, cramped, 
flat-roofed, split by narrow and winding alleys — a 
frightened herd of houses huddling shoulder to 
shoulder in the open plain. 

The house-tops are fenced round with walls and 
mat-screens ; the poles that bear the screens give the 
idea of a city that has never stood undisturbed long 
enough to take down its scaffolding. As the sun 
sinks over the Khyber all Peshawar comes out on to 
the roof to breathe the cool. You imagine that the 
screens are intended against wife-stealers and sharp- 
shooters impartially, and that Peshawar knows it is 
safer to take the air on its own house-top than among 
the knives in the street below. Plain street and house, 
bazaar and people, — that is all there is of Peshawar. 
Bleak, populous, as old as time and as young as 
yesterday, Peshawar remains to-day as Nineveh and 
Tyre, as Rome and London were — the archetype of 
cities, the lowest common denominator of habitation. 

It is only a caravanserai, yet it is choked with life 
and business. Going under the needle-eyed city gate 
you are instantly in a throng as dense as Cheapside's. 
It is a daily fair : all the peoples of the unhastening 
East meet within its walls till you can hardly move 
in the street. They are hammering and embroider- 
ing and chaffering to-day as they did yesterday and 
the day after the founding of Babel. Here and there, 
before an open upper room, you see the sign of a 

203 



On the Border 

pleader — a babu alibi-merchant, imported to swell the 
list of Peshawar's unpunished murders; but, for the 
rest, the city goes back straight into the book of 
Genesis. Here is red Esau — only he has dyed his 
beard that flaming crimson-orange to hide the grey 
hairs in it — driving in his goats. There is hawk- 
eyed, hawk-nosed Lot sitting in the gate. Then you 
lift up your eyes, and behold the camels are coming. 
To the slim dromedary of Egypt these are as the re- 
triever to the greyhound — heavy, thick-set, furred 
with soft brown hair, as if they wore tippets and 
petticoats. The veiled woman striding behind them 
in dust-stained trousers might be Rachel, the heavy 
bales of merchandise hiding her father's gods. 

From Kabul with apples and raisins and pistachio- 
nuts, from Bokhara and Teheran with rich-coloured 
fabrics, come the laden camels, and they wind back up 
the Khyber heavy with cloth and raw sugar and tools. 
Then the Peshawar bazaars are not merely exchanges, 
but manufactories as well. One street is a row of 
clattering coppersmiths : they ornament bronze ves- 
sels with bands and scrolls of white by sheer ham- 
mering of the metal. Next are the silversmiths, each 
with his tiny charcoal furnace on the shop-floor under 
his nose. They are common to all India, but per- 
haps a shade more necessary to Peshawar : they turn 
rupees into the nose-rings and bangles which are the 
native savings-bank. As you pass out of the gate you 
are among the waxcloth-workers, and these are more 

204 



On the Border 

special to the place. Waxcloth is not a kind of lino- 
leum, but any material — silk, cotton, satin — embroid- 
ered in wax. You have seen it often enough in Eng- 
land — white or golden peacocks and palms on blue or 
crimson ; but it astonishes you to see it being made. 
A boy squats on the floor with a lump of sticky white, 
like putty, on the ball of his thumb ; with a steel- 
pointed stylus he kneads it up, takes a point-full, as 
you fill a pen, and begins to draw on the fabric. You 
would think no skill could ever make the treacly stufF 
manageable, yet the shaggy stripling — let us hope his 
hand is cleaner than it looks — draws a peacock's 
feather in it with nothing more to copy than a spider 
has in making his web. When it is done and dry, it 
remains for ever, and you can wash your work of art 
without bringing off a line. 

This for the city ; now drive out of the gate over 
the dusty two miles to the cantonment. The evening 
sun will slant into your eyes — the European quarter 
stands forward towards the mountains, screening the 
city — and the air after sunset will be like cold water 
on your skin. At the end of February Peshawar has 
still two months of cool before it. Later it becomes 
a crackling inferno, but till May it breathes as divine 
a climate as man could wish to live in. Along the 
Mall the yellow grass, the palms, and the crimson- 
purple bells are India ; the trees just knobby with new 
buds, the hedges beginning to redden and cream into 
roses, the soft breathing of violets are pure spring. 

205 



On the Border 

The morning air has the nip of spring, the runnels of 
water from the Swat River canal fill the valley with 
whispers of Its coming. India crumbles and soaks 
from dry season to wet ; this cool leaf-fringed can- 
tonment, with its straight avenues of sheer spring, is 
new blood in the veins of northern men. 

Now, as the patrol was riding one of these same 
avenues of spring on a windy night in February, there 
flew a sudden volley out of the dark, and in the morn- 
ing they found one sowar dead and the other with a 
bullet through his thigh, and both carbines gone. 
They were away in the hills, where a true-shooting 
weapon Is even as a tall hat In London. In the blue 
hills, an hour from the violets, he who owns a Martini 
or Lee-Metford bears the hall-mark of respectability. 
He is fairly started in life, a credit to his family, a 
factor to be reckoned with in society. Presently he 
will build himself a tower, and then perhaps steal 
another rifle and sell it. With the proceeds he will 
buy a wife or two — they are a great deal cheaper 
than breech-loading rifles — and found a family. It 
may even be his to bring the feud of generations to 
an honourable end, by killing the last adult member 
of the opposing family. So he will die full of years 
and honour, bequeathing to his first-born a stainless 
name and a title-deed sighted up to 2000 yards. 

A judge on circuit finds In his camp a hook-nosed, 
white-bearded grandfather, hung like a trophy with 
knives and swords, with a Webley revolver — the gift 

206 



On the Border 

of a European well-wisher — and a couple of flintlock 
pistols in his belt, with a six-foot mother-of-pearl- 
inlaid, sickle-butted jezail over his shoulder, and be- 
hind him two young men similarly armed. 

" You kept my petition waiting, O Presence," he 
explains ; " this night I shall sleep in your camp." 

" I'm hanged if you will," says the Presence. 

" Do you think I am going back to my tower by 
dark ? " laughs the old man. " Myself and my son 
and my nephew are the last of our family, and our 
enemies have a dozen left still." So he sleeps in the 
inviolable camp of the sahib, and goes back to his 
tower next morning, and pulls up the twenty-foot 
ladder after him. He has not been out between sun- 
down and sunrise for years — not since he shot his 
tenth man of the other side — and he never means to. 
Only one day it occurs to the sahib that he has not 
seen his old friend for some time, and on inquiry he 
learns that they got him in the end. 

An Afridi subadar-major — senior native officer of 
a famous regiment — one day went on furlough. His 
time ran out and he did not return. A week went 
by, and then another ; still no subadar-major. The 
officers wondered : it was impossible that a man of 
his service, of his proved loyalty, should have de- 
serted ; where could he be ? Another week ; and 
there appeared in barracks a dirty-haired youth with a 
letter. " I am grieved to overstay my time," wrote 
the subadar-major, " but what can I do ? I am the 

207 



On the Border 

last of my clan, and two of my enemies sit outside 
my tower night and day." It seemed a poor look-out 
for the gallant officer, and the next on the list for 
promotion was congratulated by his clansmen in 
advance. But a week after, unannounced, there 
walked into barracks the subadar-major himself, 
chest expanded, whiskers curling with satisfaction. 
" A wonderful thing. Colonel Sahib," he explained. 
"I awoke one morning and looked out of my loop- 
hole, and there — I could hardly believe my eyes — 
there were both my enemies in one line ! So I took 
my rifle and shot them both with one bullet, and re- 
turned hither with all speed." 

You will hardly believe it, but that is the normal 
state of social intercourse among the Pathans. And 
not only among them across the border, but in the 
plain also : wherever the Pathan is, there rifle-steal- 
ing is the staple industry, murder a social duty, and 
violent death the common lot of man. On Thursdays, 
riding past the jail to the meet of the Peshawar Vale 
Hounds, you will remark on it if you do not see a 
man being hanged. But in such cases as shooting the 
man who stole your wife, or shooting the man who 
shot your brother who stole his wife, or shooting the 
man who shot your father who shot his brother who 
stole your mother — why, in domestic matters like this 
it is not expedient that the law should be over-curious. 
It is not well to hang men for doing their social duty : 
a wise Government will temper routine with sympathy. 

208 



On the Border 

Occasionally, indeed, this attitude is slightly mis- 
apprehended. A worthy Pathan was much troubled 
by the scandalous misbehaviour of a vicious mother. 
He confided his sorrows to a magistrate, who promised 
to help him in any way he could. " Well then, 
sahib, the best plan I can think of is this. One night 
some brigands from over the border will come down 
and abduct my mother. I shall complain to you, and 
you will send Staunton Sahib with police. But they 
will not find my mother, and we shall hear no more 
of her for ever." 

" Ah, this thou should'st have done, 
And not have spoken on't," 

murmured the magistrate. But in the end he got the 
bad old lady locked up for one of her misdeeds, and 
the son was as happy as if he had scuppered her him- 
self in the character of a trans-border raider. 

It is the truth that here, on the thin line between 
elaborate civilisation and primeval barbarism, where 
you may begin your morning by trying a duet with a 
lady on a grand piano and finish it with a tulwar 
through your belly — here there is more sympathy be- 
tween white man and native than anywhere else 
in India. British soldiers pull tugs-of-war against 
Kohati school-boys, whose fathers may easily have 
shot their room-mates. British gentlemen sit down to 
table with Mussulmans — each considering the other 
irretrievably ripe for damnation, but each knowing the 

209 



On the Border 

other to be a man. The Briton was made to do with 
the barbarian, being — the more you think of it the 
clearer you see it — half a barbarian himself. For if 
the carbine-thieves crouching in the wind-gusts by the 
roadside are one side of the matter, the squad here at 
riding-school, the squad there at bayonet-drill, the 
Sikh recruits practising the double — these are the 
other. For the first time in India's history the moun- 
taineers look down over the border at India rich, but 
India armed and unsleeping. With us it is as with 
them : the hand keeps the head. 



210 



XXIII 
THE KHYBER 

The front-door of India, Bombay, is magnificent ; 
the back-door, the Khyber, is therefore naturally 
shabby. Out of the rose-hedges of Peshawar a dust- 
yellow road carries you through a dust-grey plain, 
heading for dust-drab mountains. India seems worn 
out — giving up the weary effort to be soil, reverting 
limply to rock, sand, mud. 

An hour your tonga tongles — there is no ready- 
made word for its combination of rumble, jolt, jump, 
spin, and fly — straight for the hills, which seem ever 
to recede. You mark a point between two ridges as 
the mouth of the Pass; you drive through it, and you 
are still in the plain; that gap beyond must be the 
mouth. Then, almost insensibly, you do enter the 
jaws. Walls of brown rock enclose you on either 
side ; a round hill of brown rock, crowned with a mud 
fort, blocks you in front ; a turn in the road, and a 
sweeping ridge of brown rock cuts you off behind. 
Above the walls, beyond the hill, behind the ridge, 
spring up with every turn other walls, other hills, 
other ridges, more sheer, more towering, more mazy 
than the first. You rise and rise, now along the gully 

211 



The Khyber 

of a defile, now sweeping round a rim, now zigzag- 
ging up a face ; at one moment peeping over a 
shoulder at the plain behind, the next dashing con- 
fidently towards two sky-swallowing, khaki-coloured, 
black-spangled humps that seem to fill the whole 
world. Frowning over your head, slipping away 
from under your foot, letting in vast perspectives of 
more khaki rock and black bush, shutting up the 
world into two cliffs and an abyss — the Khyber is a 
mere perplexity of riotous mountain. 

You would say these savage hills could support 
nothing but solitude — yet here are the mountaineers. 
A couple of lithe aquiline young men in khaki and 
sandals rise out of a heap of stones as you pass, and 
shoulder Snider muskets. On the hill above, under 
the mud-walled block-house, loll half-a-dozen more. 
These are of the Khyber Rifles — Afridis who, now that 
the war is over, have returned without malice and 
without abashment to their old service of guarding 
the Pass. They start out of nothing at every wind 
of the road ; on all the lower summits you can just 
make out khaki pickets against the khaki country. 

For to-day the Pass is very full. Above you, in a 
short cut between two serpentines of the driving road, 
you see the ordered columns of a British regiment de- 
scending; and at the next turn you almost fling a 
file of its transport mules over the precipice. Spin 
down the next decline, shave the boulder at the angle, 
and — Ai ! toot ! wheeze, wheeze, toot ! ai, pig ! — we 

212 



The Khyber 

are plump in the middle of two meeting caravans en- 
tangled in a commissariat-train. The camels from 
Kabul barracked for the night at Landi Kotal, those 
from Peshawar at Jamrud ; to-day, which is the open 
day, they cross in the Khyber. The Pass is now — or 
was then — open two days a-week, which means that 
it is picketed by Khyber Rifles while the caravans go 
through. Twice a-week they go up towards Kabul; 
twice a-week they come down into India, needing the 
whole day to make the Pass. This is the sum of the 
intercourse between India and Afghanistan. 

Now comes an hour of steady jostle and shove and 
bang, of abortive attempts to toot the broken-winded 
bugle and more successful vilifications of all camels, 
bullocks, camelmen, bullock-drivers, and all progeni- 
tors and collaterals of the same. The down-coming 
and the up-going camels of course are jammed in a 
second, and of course the drivers do not care. One 
laden beast balances himself on the eyebrow of the 
drop and lifts his eyes to heaven in plaintive appeal 
against the woes of life ; the next huddles under the 
wall and tries to shove it back with a truss of straw, 
so as to make more room ; the next plants himself 
directly in the middle of the road and squeals in help- 
less horror as the tonga barges at him. Struggling 
down to where the road touches the Khyber Water 
under the mud battlements of Ali Musjid, we enter 
the stratum of bullock-carts, just as they have finally 
decided that the best thing to do is to lie down across 

213 



The Khyber 

the path and let the camels clamber over them. No 
created thing can wake emotion in a commissariat 
bullock. Twist his tail, hit him over the head, heave 
a tonga-wheel — half as heavy as a field-gun's — into 
his flank : he looks benevolent and remains placidly 
in the way. When at last the idea of action has pene- 
trated his hide, he methodically hooks his yoke into 
the nearest wheel with a look of profound meekness, 
and plunges into meditation again. So the tonga stops 
and everybody abuses everybody else till they are 
tired ; then they rest a little, and abuse a little more 
with fresh breath ; finally, they unite to unhook the 
yoke and push the cart on to the bullocks. They, 
finding the cart moving by itself, are eventually pene- 
trated by an idea again. " It seems, brother, they 
wish us to move again." " Very well, brother ; let us 
always do what they wish us to do." And so they 
move thoughtfully on. 

The Kabul-bound camels are beneath us now, 
promenading with dignity along the bed of the stream. 
It was worth the delay to look at them ; for the camel 
of Central Asia is the flower of his otherwise dis- 
creditable family. His cousins of Egypt and India are 
necessary evils : he is a joy to the eye, and he knows 
it. They are all neck and leg, all corners and mis- 
placed joints, half-snake, half-folding bedstead : his 
daintily tilted nose is thrust out of a shower of rich 
brown silken fur. It cascades from the ears all down 
his throat to the chest, like a lady's boa, only far 

214 



The Khyber 

longer and finer, and especially far better worn. His 
shoulders and thighs are clothed in brown astrachan. 
Altogether he is an animal with contours, not a fold- 
ing monstrosity ; and he knows it. Other camels are 
tied head to tail on the march : he tramps along 
serenely under his heavy load, picking his own way, 
convinced of the superiority which others only feign, 
not to be thrown out of his business by anything less 
devilish than a wheeled double centaur with the voice 
of a bugle. 

From Ali Musjid the road seesaws, with a balance 
of ascent and the pass gradually widens. You begin 
to see villages — or the dry bones of them. Jagged 
stumps of towers and rents where walls were print 
the record of the punishment of the Afridis. When 
they took our fort at Landi Kotal they stripped off 
every stick of wood and carried it away ; when we de- 
stroyed their towers we did likewise : on these stark 
hills wood, next to a rifle, is the most desirable posses- 
sion life can offer. As you swing up and down the 
grades of dust you see now and again the black blot 
of a cave-mouth in the hills : these are now the vil- 
lages of the Khyber Afridis. 

At last you turn your final corner. In front of 
you, across folds and rifts in the ground, is a white 
encampment ; to your right you are quite close on a 
long quadrangular fort, towers at the angles, loop-holes 
along the tall walls, the Union-Jack over all. Behind 
it is another encampment. You have reached the 

215 



The Khyber I 

1 
quarters of the Khyber Brigade at Landi Kotal. You 

are on the very rim of British India. Behind the 
elbow of the road is Landi Khana, whither the Afghan 
escort brings the Kabul cavaran : the click of a tele- 
gram, the call of a bugle, and British troops could be 
in Afghanistan again. 

But we must not talk of themes like these. Mean- 
while here are three battalions and a mountain battery 
and sappers, under the best-trusted brigadier in India, 
every man as fit as the hills can make him, and foot- 
ball-ankles the only solace of the hospital. It is not 
exactly active service, but it is the next best thing to 
it. The surrounding population is obedient in large j| 
things and sportive in small. The Shinwari vil- 
lagers — those are their walls and square, tapering, 
forty-foot towers sloping up the branching valley 
northward — are thoroughly friendly : when you ob- 
serve the easy access to their homes and their young 
corn just greening the dust-coloured earth, you wonder 
the less at their virtue. The very Afridis southward 
submit to the General as their arbiter. They have a 
custom, when they plough, of meeting in jirgah, and 
there each man lays down a stone before him ; while 
the ploughing lasts the stones are down, and all blood- 
feuds sleep. The other day, the war with the Sirkar 
being over, and a feeling abroad that the rifles had 
been silent too long, they came to the General Sahib 
for permission to lift the stones and open the each- 
other-shooting season. " The first village that begins 

2i6 



The Khyber 

will be destroyed," said he, and they went away sor- 
rowful, but obedient. 

Only in small things they are a law unto them- 
selves : you could hardly expect them to deny them- 
selves the exercise of rifle-stealing with a whole 
brigade of Lee-Metfords and Martinis before their 
very eyes. So on dark nights the promising young 
Afridi creeps down towards the sentry, who, if he 
is sleepy, will be found next morning with a knife 
in his back instead of a rifle. As a rule, he is not 
sleepy. Then there are shots, and perhaps shots in 
return; but, what with the dark and the hillman's 
cunning, and the danger of shooting at large in 
camp at night, it is seldom that a rifle-thief is 
bagged. There was a story of a British sentry who 
was both knifed and beaten over the head with the 
butt of his own rifle ; but he clung to the sling like 
a Briton, and the Afridi went empty away. 

All things considered, you had better be wary 
when going home after dinner in the Khyber camp. 
Within the perimeter let your " friend " follow closely 
on the Ghurkha's " Hahlt, huggas ther ? " — outside it 
they shoot first and challenge afterwards. Better 
take the air by day— say, on a route-march with the 
Ghurkhas. Khaki jackets and short baggy breeches 
that leave a bare knee above the putties, black belts, 
and hunting-horns on their buttons like our Rifles', 
bayonet on one hip, and broad-bladed kukri on the 
other, a tiny round cap worn over the ear, and leaving 

217 



The Khyber 

the sun to get through the close-cropped bullet-head 
if he can — the jolly, flat-faced little mountaineers 
will repay you for more than a morning's march with 
them. They leap from stone to stone like he-goats 
till you are right up, up below the clouds, and the 
Khyber country and Afghanistan are unrolled below 
you. 

You see, and at length you understand the cam- 
paign against the Afridis. Gad, what a country ! 
Not a level yard for miles, and miles, and miles ! Not 
a fair field of fire within the whole horizon. Noth- 
ing but a welter of naked khaki-coloured mountain. 
Shale scree giving on to precipice, ridge entangling 
ridge, height topping height. You toil up a knee- 
loosening face to the summit, and there is another 
summit dominating you ; up that, and there is another, 
and yet another, and another. No end, no direction, 
no security — nothing but exposure and sheer toil. 
From the white steeps of the Hindu Khush in the sky 
to the back-dotted wild-olive bushes beside you — not 
a green thing, not an open place, nothing but hard, 
sterile, unorientable fanged impossibility. 

Only down there, on the other side, the Kabul river 
threads the mountains in its mail of sunshine. There 
is level ground and green corn-fields in the valley ; 
there is Dakka, the first Afghan town ; and there, in 
that spreading pool of green, the hazy shimmer must 
be Jellalabad. How many marches ? Is that blur 
their cavalry lines ? It is easy to be wise about the 

218 



The Khyber 

forward policy from your arm-chair; but go up with 
a regiment and look out from your own barren peaks 
on to the green plains over the border. You will un- 
derstand what a frontier feels like, and why frontiers 
have a habit of not standing still. 



219 



XXIV • 

THE MALAKAND 

The flagging ponies gave one last hoist to the tonga, 
in the afterglow six miles of upward-straining road 
lay behind us along the huge mountain like a pack- 
thread. We turned an elbow of clifF, and behold it 
was night. OfF the empty hillside — bare precipice 
above, bare abyss below — we were suddenly in a 
dense wood of black trees, among shadows and 
echoes ; and all about, above in the sky, plumb below 
in some bottomless pit deep, deep beneath our feet, 
camp-fires played on white canvas. Where were we ? 
Which was back or front, above or below, head or 
heels ? The world seemed to be tilted up on end. 

" Is the house of the Sahib near ? " says I, in my 
pure Urdu. " Near, O Presence." " Where ? " 
For answer the half-soldier, half-footman pointed 
above his head. Exactly in line with the ventilation 
of my helmet I saw a light hanging between two 
stars. It was about ten yards as the crow flies; 
as the man climbs it looked ten miles. Surely the 
world was tilted up on end. This was the Malakand. 

Four years ago nobody except political officers had 
ever heard of the Malakand, or knew whether it was 

220 



The Malakand 

a mountain, a river, or the title of a local chief. For 
four years past it has been the most frequented name 
on all the Frontier. It is a pass lying a little to the 
east of north of Peshawar, almost due north of Now- 
shera, and forty-eight miles from it. The Malakand 
opens — if " opens " is the word for such a tangle — 
into almost the only part of the North-West 
Frontier which we had been able to let alone. The 
tribes beyond it — in Swat and Bajaur and Dir, and all 
the other uncouth places with uncouth names — were 
content to stew in the blood of their own feuds, and 
prudently we let them stew. 

Before 1895 our frontier-post was Mardan — 
" Mardan, where the Guides are." Here, ever since 
its foundation, that famous regiment has been quar- 
tered in the intervals of campaigns which have con- 
sistently added to the lustre of its record. The only 
corps in India, except the Ghurkha battalions, which 
has permanent quarters, the Guides have made Mardan 
less of a station than a regimental home. Here are 
its family heirlooms- — the mess-walls covered with 
heads of buffalo and ibex, antelope and mountain- 
sheep, with banners taken from the enemy, and queer 
Greco-Buddhist statuary excavated out of the neigh- 
bouring hills. Here is the regimental cemetery — full 
now, and overflowing into a new one — and an arch 
and little garden tardily erected by Government to 
the memory of the handful of the Guides who died at 
their post round Cavagnari in Kabul. There is home- 

221 



The Malakand 

liness in the little swimming-bath in the officers' 
garden, as there is romance in the fort with sentries 
of many types — here a Sikh, there an Afridi, a 
Ghurkha, a Rajput, a Dogra — for " God's Own " is 
welded of the pick of all the fighting races of India. 

In enormous long white trousers sepoys and sowars 
walk placidly about their home and the home of their 
fathers : for the fighting native puts down his young 
son for the Guides as you might at home for the 
Travellers'. You come across a native officer of 
forty-two years' service — straight away to before the 
Mutiny — a smiling little old gentleman, whose dyed 
beard only just matches the mahogany of his skin. 
He regrets, politely, that the Guides were not able to 
be present at Omdurman, and remarks, as an in- 
centive to my future efforts, that he himself saw a 
war-correspondent killed at Landakai. Every officer 
or man you meet has the air of a gentleman taking his 
ease in his own house. Mardan is the concrete 
epitome of the spirit that makes a regiment — the only 
satisfactory translation I ever met of the words esprit 
de corps. 

Through Mardan in 1895 advanced the force which 
brought the Malakand into frontier politics. Chitral 
was to be relieved, and the relieving force, taking the 
directest road, had to force the Pass, and we have held 
it ever since. But Chitral was relieved from the 
other side, from Gilgit, and the reward of our inter- 
ference with the Malakand was the furious assault 

222 



The Malakand 

upon It and the fort of Chakdara beyond, which 
inaugurated the great frontier war of 1897 ^^^ 1898. 
Now it makes one more of our garrisons beyond the 
old frontier of India — garrisons where no man knows 
whether he will wake up to-morrow to find peace or 
war. Whether such posts make in the end for the 
one or the other, who is to decide ? Without their 
deterrent, say some, you would have the tribes on you 
to-morrow. Without their menace, urge others, you 
would never have had the tribes on you at all. Un- 
fortunately both may be true, and the result, in- 
security, is one and the same. 

In the morning it was possible to look over the 
position — but easier to look than to comprehend. 
You will find it put clearly both in word and plan in 
Mr. Winston Churchill's "Story of the Malakand 
Field Force " ; but no putting short of actual sight 
can do justice to the supernatural complication of the 
Malakand. " It would take the whole British army 
to hold it," said a good judge ; " and then I don't 
quite see what the plan would be." Try to arrange 
a box of tin soldiers on a rockery, and you will get 
some idea of it. There is, indeed, a tennis-court, but 
that has been made artificially ; otherwise there is not 
level ground for a billiard-table. From the top of the 
place where I eventually landed to the bottom, where 
I saw the coolies' camp-fires, you could easily pitch 
a stone ; yet to walk from one extremity of the 
position to the other would take you hours. The 

223 



The Malakand 

road comes up the Pass, but where it ought to de- 
bouch on to a plateau it winds through a sieve of 
deep holes. What ought to be the diverging sides of 
the Pass are terraces of hills, each one commanded by 
the one behind it. What ought to be the sloping, 
opening valley beyond the Pass is choked by a hand- 
ful of rocky hills promiscuously flung all about it. As 
a military position, you can say this of it, that if you 
have enough men to hold higher hills than the assail- 
ant, keeping touch, you ought to be able to hold it ; 
and if the assailant has enough men to hold higher 
hills than you have, keeping touch, he ought to be 
able to take it — which amounts to saying nothing 
at all. 

This luminous theory may explain why the authori- 
ties build forts on this hill, and then pull them down 
and put them up again on that ; why they jfirst put the 
troops here, then there, then take them away alto- 
gether, then bring them back and reinforce them. 
But we may leave that to them, and turn to the only 
proper occupation on a frontier — going on. Over 
sky-lines, round corners, you must still be going on to 
see what there is on the other side. Round the 
corner of the right-hand wall of the Malakand you 
can just see a peeping tent or two ; as you scramble 
down, these enlarge into the camp of the Movable 
Column — a brigade stationed down in the Swat 
Valley, beyond the Pass, ready to move at any 
moment against any enemy that may appear. Further 

224 



The Malakand 

on — you are moving up a broad valley with rigidly 
enclosing walls — the driving road stops at a bridge. 
Under it is the turbulent slither of the Swat ; beyond 
is the fort of Chakdara. 

This is the sentry on the main road to Chitral. 
The bridge is India all over : piers of stout stone — it 
must need it all when the Swat comes down in spate 
— carry stout cables ; but the long bridge that is hung 
from them is tacked on with wire, buckling in the 
middle, swinging in the wind. The fort is of a type 
already familiar — heavy gate, a horn-work to protect 
horses, towers and loopholes, signal-station at the 
top, blockhouses on the immediately covering hills. 
In the barracks that form one side sweat and frizzle 
half a battalion of Punjab infantry. The bullet-dints 
of the last siege can still be seen on the walls : the 
next may begin to-morrow. 

For our last bit of frontier push a few miles further 
up the Swat. It is a queer valley historically — a 
valley with a past. Many think that it was by it 
that Alexander the Great, the first and best of frontier 
generals, descended to the conquest of the Punjab; 
certainly the ancient Buddhists occupied it in great 
importance. You find their sculptuary — half-Indian 
types, half-Greek — under almost every mound from 
here to Mardan, and west and east into Bajaur and 
Buner; their hemispherical shrines crown appropriate 
hillocks, both here and in the Khyber ; either they or 
Alexander made the road — too stiffly graded for these 

225 



The Malakand 

degenerate days — which still runs alongside ours. 
The conclusion from all of which is that the Swat 
Valley is capable of far more importance than it has 
lately claimed. The Buddhists were great traders, 
and this may have been one of their main highways 
into Central Asia, as it was Alexander's into India. 
What has been may be again. 

Of the riches of the valley there can be no question. 
A gridiron of canals, drawn from the Swat, has turned 
it into one teeming rice-field. In this hard land it is 
luxury to drop your eyes from the bleak mountains to 
the vivid green. After the summer there are loads on 
loads of rice to export, and cloth and tea to bring 
back. If we only had the administration of the val- 
ley, — but as we canter over the stony bed of a tributary 
we are suddenly in the midst of them. Here are the 
Swatis, who two years ago found Paradise by thou- 
sands in the attempt to slaughter our countrymen, 
come out to bid us good day, and escort us against 
any possible harm. Then they were enemies ; now 
they are local levies — irregular, very irregular, forces 
of her Majesty, who supplies them with their sabres 
and Sniders. Next year, or next week, or to-morrow 
— well, never mind to-morrow. 

The shaggy group — perhaps fifty of them, a dozen 
parish councillors on short-barrelled country-breds, 
and the rest ambling along on foot — belongs to the 
tribe of the Yussufzais, or sons of Joseph. Every- 
body on the frontier firmly believes that they are the 

226 



The Malakand 

lost ten tribes of the House of Israel. Their vices 
suggest it, and certainly they look it. Powerful 
beaks, thick outward-drawn lips, floating raven-wing 
hair and beards, eyeballs a trifle close together — only 
not the eyes of your Jew — eyes hard as flint-stone. I 
was told that there is a place named after the Yussuf- 
zais on the borders of Persia and Beluchistan, al- 
though nobody in that country to-day knows that 
such a tribe exists. That is suggested as one of the 
halting-places of the Israelites on their travels east- 
ward. It would be a queer irony if one-half of the 
kingdom of Solomon had turned to the Jews we know 
and the other half to these wild beasts of hillmen. 
Never mind who they are : they are uncommonly 
amiable to-day, and would die for the Sahibs as a 
matter of course. So we troop along to the spur of 
Landakai, whence the Upper Swat Valley pushes its 
emerald tongue yet farther into the mountains. The 
Swatis discourse of the fight there little over a year 
ago, when our people and theirs respectively killed 
each other ; they discuss the points of the engage- 
ment with calmness and absolute impartiality. The 
game is over now, and they bear no malice. To- 
morrow, when the reliefs go up to Chitral, when the 
Mad Fakir comes down again — then they will have 
another try at cutting our throats ; but always with- 
out malice, and in the best spirit of the game. 



227 



XXV 

THE FRONTIER QUESTION 

The frontier question is like the frontier country. 
Toilfully surmount one branch of it — and it is com- 
manded and controlled by another. Struggle through 
the pass of one problem — and it opens on to a worse 
tangle of others. 

Take a typical case — Chitral. At the first recon- 
naissance nothing could be simpler. Obviously, for 
a host of reasons, we ought to keep clear of Chitral. 
An invasion of India in anything like force from that 
side is all but inconceivable. The country, as well 
as the country between it and India, is infernal, the 
inhabitants devilish. Before we began to meddle they 
were content to exercise their devilishness upon each 
other. Our interference has brought us two costly 
and profitless wars already; it threatens a fresh one 
every spring when the Chitral garrison is relieved. It 
clogs our finances with the permanent expense of the 
Chitral and Malakand garrisons and of the Malakand 
movable column, which is necessary to cover the re- 
liefs by threatening the tribesmen's villages ; for we 
no more hold the road to Chitral than we do the road 
from the Cape to Cairo. Our interference hampers 

228 



The Frontier Question 

our policy by the consciousness of a perpetually vul- 
nerable point. Decidedly we ought never to have 
gone to Chitral ; ought never to have stayed there ; 
ought, if we must stay there, to have communicated 
with it, as originally, from Gilgit. The whole busi- 
ness is a palpable, costly, ghastly blunder. 

Thus triumphantly we crown that height. And 
then, unfortunately for our comfort of mind, we begin 
to observe fresh heights to be crowned above us. As, 
for instance, the following. It is quite true that In- 
dia could never be assailed in force, especially by an 
army bringing guns and transport, from Chitral. Yet 
it has a strategical importance — contingent, but, as- 
suming the contingency, vital. From Chitral down 
the Chitral and Kunar valleys a comparatively easy 
road runs to Jellalabad. Therefore, if we were fight- 
ing Russia, as many think we should do, along the 
Kabul-Kandahar line, even a small force descending 
that valley from Chitral could turn our flank, work 
round our rear, break up our whole position. That 
for one point. For another : we had to go to Chitral, 
because if we had not Russia would have put an agent 
there, who would have made it his business to stir up 
the tribes against us 5 so that we should have had the 
wars of '95 and '97 just the same, only worse. For 
another point : . even though we thought it was wrong 
to go to Chitral, and though Sir George Robertson 
was wrong to meddle with its dynastic quarrels, could 
you leave him to be cut up ? For another : even 

229 



The Frontier Question 

though Lord Rosebcry was prudent in refusing to hold 
Chitral or make the road from the Malakand, can you, 
having once advanced against Asiatics, safely retire ? 

The more you look at it, the more it mazes you — 
point topping point, and argument crossing argument. 
And that is only the very tiniest fraction of the whole 
frontier question. There are a dozen places like 
Chitral, each with a tangled problem of its own ; and 
above all are the greater questions — the influence on 
India proper, the defence against Russia — with all 
their branches. And the peculiarly exasperating 
feature of these difficulties is that every action we 
take seems to leave them more confounded than be- 
fore. 

We went to Kabul in 1840-42 and 1878-80, each 
time with great expense and loss. Yet you find men 
in India firmly convinced that we must go to Kabul 
again when the Amir dies, and again when the next 
Amir dies, and so on to an infinity of dynasties. 
What policy could be more heroic or more impotent ? 
You know not whether to call it bravery or despair ; 
and there are other men who, recognising this, say 
that the next time we go to Kabul we must stay. It 
comes to this : we went there twice to preserve a 
buff'er against Russia; and now, the third time, we are 
to destroy that buffer by our own act. It is precisely 
thus that the frontier lures you on. 

Similarly with the recent war. When you speak 
of " the war " in India now, you can only mean one 

230 



The Frontier Question 

war — the Tirah - Mohmund - Mamund - Swat- Bajaur- 
Buner campaign of '97 and '98. There is a great 
deal of disappointment and a little bitterness in India 
about " the war." Civilians, as a rule, execrate it 
root and branch ; soldiers feel that perhaps the most 
difficult campaign in history, and deeds certainly never 
surpassed for endurance and valour, have been scantily 
recognised at home, where popular applause and of- 
ficial reward have been reserved for the luckier heroes 
of easier enterprises. The feeling is most natural; 
but the blame, if there is any, lies not with the British 
Government nor the British public. They inevitably 
reward and applaud campaigns, not according to their 
difficulty, but according to their results. When " the 
war " was over, what was there to show for it — for the 
greatest exertions of the largest force which the empire 
has put into the field for a generation ? Only the 
prospect of more, and similarly inconclusive, wars in 
the near future. If more could have been done with 
the force, then any blame must lie with the generals. 
If all was done that man could do, then the blame is 
with the Indian authorities who embarked so huge a 
force on an enterprise which could never justify its 
employment. 

Yet that is not quite fair either. For the great 
campaign, though nobody pretends that it achieved 
results commensurate with the force squandered upon 
it, did at least issue in some tangible gain. The tribes 
did not come out of it so well as they seem to have 

231 



The Frontier Question 

done. Probably they suffered less loss In men than 
we did ; certainly, though there was a hollow pretence 
of disarmament, they were not disarmed. Yet, in 
one way, they were vastly impressed. The Afridis, 
for an example, had always held themselves invulnera- 
ble in Tirah ; a British force marched through their 
valleys, destroying crops and villages at will. 

Briefly, we proved that at any time we choose we 
can exterminate the Afridi nation. We can occupy 
their valleys in unassailable force, destroy everything, 
and drive men, women, and children into the winter 
snows to starve and freeze to death. The knowl- 
edge of that — and they know it well enough — is a 
warning even to their levity against more than 
ordinary misbehaviour in the future. But then — an- 
other height to complicate the position — the extermi- 
nation of the Afridis is just what we do not want. 
Setting aside the atrocity of it, we want to keep the 
Afridis for our own use. The fighting races of India 
proper are even now, in some opinions, falling off; 
with settled government and canals, with just taxation 
and courts of appeal, they are certain to deteriorate in 
the long-run. In the recent war, say many good 
judges, by far the best of our soldiers were Afridis 
fighting against their own people; and as long as they 
stick to the national industry of rifle-stealing and 
mutual murder, they are likely to remain so. 

But now — it will make your head ache — comes 
another dominating height. Will the Afridis stick to 

232 



The Frontier Question 

the industries that foster their present martial quali- 
ties? Already firearms of precision are so common 
among them that private war is becoming more than 
a joke. With a jezail it was a question of stalking 
your man and bringing him down with a long, long 
aim at 500 yards. With a Lee-Metford you sit in 
your tower, and as soon as your enemy comes out to 
cut a cabbage in his garden — bang ! you get him 
easily at 1000. Even Afridis will find life impossible 
under these conditions in the long-run. 

Meantime, since we do not wish to exterminate the 
Afridis, and it is poor fun fighting them on their own 
ground in their own style, the course appears to be to 
treat them well, and, if possible, enlist the whole 
nation of them. Training in our army will not make 
them any more dangerous at their own style of war- 
fare — they are perfect at that already ; if anything it 
will put them more on terms with us. So far so 
good; but there are a thousand little folds in this 
ground also — as what relations we are to maintain 
with them and how, what we are to do for the safety 
of the Khyber route, and so on, and so on. We 
might easily lose ourselves in these — so perhaps we 
had better not venture in. 

At the back of everything remains Russia. You 
may reply that Russia could not invade India, that 
never were we on better terms with Russia, that 
Russia proposes disarmament, and many other things. 
All that — forgive me — is childish nonsense. Russia 

233 



The Frontier Question 

knows quite well that we shall not invade Central 
Asia, that the Amir will not invade Central Asia ; yet 
at this moment she has just finished a railway that 
brings her within a week of Herat. If that road is 
not for aggression, what is it for ? Trade ? Partly, 
perhaps, but the trade will never pay the working 
expenses. For the sake of trade it is even proposed 
that we shall agree to couple up our Indian railways 
with Russia's Central Asian. Russia and Germany 
link railways at the frontier, you say ; why not Trans- 
caspia and India ? Simply because Russia and Ger- 
many are approximately equal in military force, and 
are bound to respect each other. Our military force 
is out of proportion inferior to Russia's, and we must 
redress the balance with every advantage of position 
we can keep or take. 

Then, what to do ? The whole question turns on 
where you intend to fight ; though it is astonishing 
how few people in India, even soldiers, are clear on 
that point. Russia could not invade India through 
Afghanistan at present : difiiculties of transport would 
be insuperable. Therefore, if you advance to the 
line of the Helmund to meet her — through diffi- 
cult country and savage tribes — you are wantonly 
throwing away your only good card in the game. On 
the other hand, if you elect to fight along the border 
mountains, Russia can swallow Afghanistan piece- 
meal. First, she can establish herself and accumulate 
stores, supplies, and beasts to carry them, in the val- 

234 



The Frontier Question 

ley of Herat ; next in the valley of Kabul ; then sud- 
denly she is at the gate of India, and once more you 
have discarded your winning ace. 

One more complication : while we are fighting 
Russia in front, what would be happening in our rear ? 
We must fight on the Helmund, they say, because a 
defeat on the present frontier would mean revolt in 
India. But a defeat on the Flelmund could no more 
be hushed up than a defeat on the Indus : it would 
only take a few hours longer to reach the bazaars. 
But then, they answer, the danger is in letting the 
disaffected know the Russians are so near. The reply 
is that if we were beaten on the Helmund they would 
very soon be equally near, and that the only way to 
keep them out is not to be beaten at all. Therefore 
we should fight where we are likest to win. 

The best way out of the tangle is to make it clear 
that the moment Russia goes to Herat we fight. We 
fight as best we can. If Russia comes straight for 
India we should beat her ; if not, we try to wear her 
down elsewhere ; in no case do we make peace till 
she retires to her old boundary beyond Herat. But 
will the British people fight to the death for Herat, 
seeing that it is not theirs, and they do not know 
where it is ? Accustom yourself to the thought, 
O British people ! For in the long-run it is a choice 
between this, — conscription for service in India^ — and 
how would you like that ? — or else the loss of India 
altogether. 

235 



XXVI 
OF RAJAHS 

" His Highness," perspired the babu, " trusts that 
you are in the enjoyment of good health." 

"Thanks to the beneficent climate of his High- 
ness's dominions," I replied, " I am in the enjoy- 
ment of especially good health." 

With such momentous words opened my first 
serious interview with a Rajah. As I drove up to his 
palace on the hill I noticed an elephant or so left 
casually standing about at the corners of his crooked 
streets. This was his ingenuous way of hinting to 
the mind of the stranger at his rank and wealth and 
importance. An elephant is a peculiarly royal beast, 
as a peacock is a royal bird, and without one, at least, 
of each no Rajah is complete. 

At the door of the stucco palace a dishevelled 
sentry presented arms with even more than the usual 
fervour. After a moment I understood — and per- 
ceived coming down a corridor slowly, slowly, and 
quite noiselessly towards me, a small human figure. 
It wore a white turban, a tabard of lilac silk lined 
with salmon satin, a long muslin scarf round the 
neck, snow-white linen drawers, tight yet shapeless,. 

236 



Of Rajahs 

and white cotton socks. It came up, always quite 
noiselessly, appearing to be moved rather than to 
move : I saw a brown face, melting black eyes, a 
long-haired, fine-haired, oiled, black beard. 

The figure took my hand in a hand that seemed 
made of soufflet, and with the same mysterious, un- 
moving motion led me across a high-roofed hall, with 
chandeliers like forest-trees and the paint peeling off 
the skirting-board, into a verandah that overlooked a 
reeling chasm of torrent-bed and a towering heave of 
mountain beyond. He set me in a chair beside him, 
the interpreter opposite, then turned and fixed his 
eyes on me. If the movements were inhuman the 
eyes were unearthly. Eyes weary beyond satiety — 
eyes utterly passionless and purposeless, as if their 
owner neither desired anything nor intended any- 
thing, had either never had any interest in the world 
or had quite finished with it. Looking into those 
black pools of sheer emptiness, you wondered whether 
he were a new-born baby or a million years old j you 
almost wondered if he were alive or dead. 

That was the Rajah. And then, in a voice that 
seemed to fall among us from nowhere, he told the 
fat-cheeked, gold-spectacled babu to tell me he trusted 
I was in the enjoyment of good health. 

Awhile the conversation floated at this level, and I 
began to think that this Nirvana-eyed Rajah was — if 
one may so speak of princes — a fool. But presently 
the babu's circumambient periods began to coil them- 

237 



Of Rajahs 

selves round a definite subject, and the Rajah was in- 
structing me on the political question of the hour. It 
does not matter to you what the question was ; it did 
not matter to me. The interest to me lay in com- 
paring what the Rajah suggested with what I knew 
to be true. In black and white he said nothing, but 
he hinted worlds. The suggestions were so subtly 
nebulous that you could hardly be sure they meant 
anything at all; the subject seemed to be in the air 
rather than in his conversation. I found it quite im- 
possible to speak a language so evasive, and had to fly 
to brutal verbs and nouns. He accepted my remarks, 
though with deprecation of their bluntness ; so that 
at least I had the satisfaction of knowing we were 
both talking about the same things. 

But the astonishing and inhuman feature of his 
talk was that he continually conveyed to me views of 
the questions of the hour which I knew to be false, 
which he knew me to know to be false. At least he 
knew that I came with the Resident, and might have 
known that I would ask him about things and believe 
what he said. Yet, without the least encouragement, 
he insinuated and insinuated and insinuated away, till 
I felt almost a traitor to sit and listen to him. He 
cannot have thought I should take his side, or that I 
could be of any service to him if I did ; but that ap- 
peared to matter nothing. Intrigue was his nature, 
and in default of a better confederate he kept his 
hand in by trying to intrigue with me. 

238 



Of Rajahs 

And then suddenly, without a flicker in the eyes of 
either Rajah or interpreter : — 

" His Highness hopes that on your return to your 
country you will write to him from time to time, and 
give him your advice on affairs of State." 

I gasped. " His Highness has heard much of your 
good name and high reputation," pursued the bland, 
relentless voice — he had first heard and forgotten my 
name three hours before — " and he is sure that your 
opinion on the government of his country would be 
very valuable to him." 

And while I still gasped, his Highness motionlessly 
rose, handed me out of the chair with his soufflet 
touch, and prattled in English, " Do not forget me." 

I shall not forget him. Nor yet the Commander-in- 
Chief of the army — a mild little man with a stammer, 
who sat on the extreme edge of his chair. Nor the 
Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord Chancellor — 
the two officers combined in one beaming babu, who 
told us how he intended to decide cases which had 
not yet come on for hearing. Nor the feudal chief, a 
relative of his Highness, educated in England, who 
wanted to raise money. " But you're very well off, 
surely ? " said the Resident. " I regret to have to 
state, sir, that such is not the case," replied the de- 
scendant of a hundred bandits. The next function- 
ary — so clumsy is destiny — complained that " I got 
plenty pay, sir, not got no work." 

Happy State, you cry. You will say so still more 

239 



Of Rajahs 

when you hear that there are only two acute questions 
of party politics at present before it : (a) Whether a 
certain member of the royal family ought to be al- 
lowed to shoot pig, instead of preserving them for 
sticking ; and {b) Whether a nilghai is a cow. A 
nilghai, as you know, is not a cow, but an antelope ; 
it destroys crops, and the Opposition press a bill to 
legalise the shooting of it. But, on the other hand, 
urges the Government, it looks like a cow, and there 
is a strong body of tradition in favour of regarding it 
as such, and therefore holy. So the matter has been 
referred to arbitration. A college of saints at Benares 
has ruled that a nilghai is not a cow ; but it is quite 
capable of ruling, on — and for — a sufficient consid- 
eration, that, though not a cow, it is as it were a cow. 
Meantime party feeling runs strongly — as does also 
the nilghai. 

But, indeed, the native State is, in its way, a para- 
dise. As long as the Rajah behaves with tolerable 
decency, and his people are not quite outrageously 
overtaxed or disorderly, he can do exactly what he 
likes. In the old days, if he shut himself up with 
opium and nautch-girls, a neighbour would come and 
take his country ; now the Government of India in- 
structs the Resident to use his influence on the side of 
virtue, and meanwhile sees that the frontiers stand 
fixed. Then his subjects might rise against misgov- 
ernment; if they did it now British troops would 
come in to uphold him. A few years ago the Thakurs 

240 



Of Rajahs 

of Bikanir — the feudal nobles, mostly of royal blood — 
did actually set about to depose their king for incom- 
petence and exaction. This has ever been the Raj- 
put method of constitutional government — but the 
Sirkar sent a column to put the Maharajah back 
again. 

But when the Maharajah goes too far — squanders 
his revenues, or hangs his subjects up by the toes — 
the Sirkar sends him a Resident with power to do 
more than lecture on the beauty of virtue. The Resi- 
dent becomes an administrator. Mysore was gov- 
erned thus for over fifty years ; now, restored to a 
wise Queen-mother and a promising prince, it is the 
most flourishing native State in India. Kashmir was 
on the verge of bankruptcy a (ew years ago ; now, 
under the Resident as virtual Prime Minister, with 
officers lent from British India and a carefully se- 
lected Council of State, the land revenue has been in- 
creased and the burden of taxes decreased simultane- 
ously, the army decreased but made efficient, the 
Customs revenue and forest revenue doubled, and 
Kashmir's feet are on the road of prosperity again. 

Of Rajahs there are very many kinds, and much 
thought and care have been expended on the theory 
and practice of their production. The Government 
of India, while usually leaving them to themselves, 
has made an exception in the case of their manufac- 
ture. It is exceptional that a native State passes to 
an adult heir — a Rajah's life is not a healthy one : the 

241 



Of Rajahs 

average age of ruling princes appears to be about 
seventeen — and the Government of India educates 
the minors. For young Rajput chiefs there is the 
Mayo College at Ajmir; rulers of wider influence 
usually have a Governor told off to them from the In- 
dian Civil Service or Staff Corps. 

The question is, vi^hat sort of man you should aim 
at producing. The old-fashioned good Rajah — the 
conservative, pious ruler, on good terms with his Resi- 
dent and his subjects alike, but impartially disliking 
champagne, sanitation, bookmakers, female education, 
and trousers — was perhaps the most satisfactory, cer- 
tainly the most dignified, type ; but he, alas ! though 
still extant here and there, must shortly die out. 
With him, as a compensation, will probably perish the 
old-fashioned bad one, the intriguer and blackmailee, 
the tormenter of subjects and would-be assassin of Resi- 
dents, who took greedily to champagne and bookmak- 
ers and — now and then — trousers, but hated sanitation 
and female education none the less. Of the new gen- 
eration the most familiar type is the sporting Rajah. 
In what was practically the final of this year's polo 
championship, the Patiala and Kotah teams were each 
captained by the Maharajah. Other young chiefs are 
not less eminent in the saddle, and the Maharajah of 
Patiala is a keen and useful cricketer. The Nizam 
of Hyderabad is, or was, almost the best shot in the 
world. At his best the sporting Rajah is probably the 
best solution of the difiiculty of keeping a man manly 

242 



Of Rajahs 

when you deny him his hereditary pursuit of war. At 
his worst — and there is a worst — he becomes a bad 
imitation of the less dignified kind of sporting peer. 

In both cases it is hard to get him to take the least 
interest in the affairs of his subjects. After all, why 
should he ? If a second Akbar were born in India 
we should not let him rule in his own way, and he 
would in that case rather not rule at all. It is child- 
ish to blame the Rajah for being oriental. 

Thus seesaw the native States of India — over a 
third of its area, over a fourth of its population. Up 
with a good P^ajah, down with a bad ; most up with a 
very bad who brings in a British administrator. 
Many of their people would like to be annexed to 
British India; others prefer things as they are — 
especially everybody even distantly connected with 
the public service. We might annex them — there is 
never any lack of pretext — and we might leave them 
entirely alone to serve as awful examples, and make 
our subjects contented by the contrast. Instead of 
that we do — as always in India — the straight and dis- 
interested thing. We are tolerant of the Rajah as 
long as he is possible, and succour his people when he 
is not. Thus — as always in India — we get no thanks 
from either. 



243 



XXVII 
THE COMPLETE GLOBE-TROTTER 

Within the hour of your landing India begins 
playing its jokes upon you. You drive through piles 
of palace and masses of palm to a hotel whose name 
is known throughout the world. A Goanese porter 
receives you, and requests you to inhabit a sort of 
scullery on the roof. I do not exaggerate a jot. I 
have seen the European cell in a remote district jail, 
and it was very appreciably larger, lighter, cleaner, 
cooler, and more eligibly situated than the first room 
I was offered in an Indian hotel. 

As the first, so was the second, and the third, and 
all of them. By the time I left the country I had 
been in almost all the best hotels of India. Four, 
throughout the 1,800,000 square miles, might indul- 
gently be called second-class ; all the rest were unre- 
deemedly vile. When they were new they may have 
had the same pretension to elegance and comfort as a 
London public wash-house has ; but by now they are 
all very old, and suggest anything rather than wash- 
ing. There can hardly have been a depreciated rupee 
spent upon the herd of them. The walls are dirty, 
the carpets shabby, the furniture rickety, the food un- 

244 



The Complete Globe-Trotter 

eatable, the management non-existent. The only 
things barely tolerable in an Indian hotel are the 
personal service and the bedding, both of which you 
bring with you of your own. 

The apartment in which I originally recorded these 
opinions was furnished as follows. A table with a 
deep crack across it; a bedstead with a mattress 
covered with dirty ticking ; a wardrobe papered inside 
with advertisements from the " Pioneer," now black 
and peeling off in strips ; two chairs, both of which 
had holes in their cane seats, and creaked and rocked 
on their joints when you sat on them ; two occa- 
sional tables, both broken-legged and sloping peril- 
ously ; and a decayed hat-and-coat rack with one peg 
missing and two loose. There was a sort of sack- 
cloth carpet, stained, creased, and littered with bits of 
straw. All the French windows were warped and re- 
fused to shut ; over one hung two wisps of torn and 
coffee-coloured lace curtain. The walls were of green 
distemper, blotchy and coming off; in the ceiling was 
a cobwebbed hole, which once held a chandelier, and 
now held vermin. Many squirrels and mice were 
running up and down the floor. This was a shade 
worse than usual, but only a shade. All these things 
you expect in an Indian hotel ; and at the touring 
season of the year you are lucky if the swollen babu 
in the office will let you in at all. 

And after all, what do you expect ? Why should 
there be good hotels in India ? In Bombay, it is true, 

245 



The Complete Globe-Trotter 

a really good hotel is wanted, and would pay : they 
say that one is on the point of arriving. Everybody 
that comes to India comes to Bombay, and nearly 
everybody can afford to pay to be comfortable, or at 
least clean. There are always people, more or fewer, 
passing through ; also many bachelors will be found 
to live in a good hotel, for the Parsis have cornered 
all the possible bungalows. If you get custom enough 
to pay a good European proprietor to own, and a 
good European manager to manage, there is no reason 
on earth why a hotel should not be as good in India 
as in Egypt. 

But for the rest of the country, what can you ex- 
pect ? If a hotel is in the plains, it will be empty in 
the hot weather ; if in the hills, it will be empty in 
the cold. The European population of India is sparse 
and scattered, and of measureless hospitality. The 
white man sees less of hotels than of tents, of dak 
bungalows on lonely, half-made roads, or rest-houses 
by lonely, half-empty canals. His work is always 
hanging on his back, and will not let him travel at 
large ; if he goes for a day or two into a town, it is to 
a friend or to the club. So the hotel languishes. 
Presently the European owner sells it cheap to a 
native, and he puts in first a Eurasian manager and 
then a babu ; and the owner will not spend a pie to 
renew the furniture or new-stain the walls, and the 
manager will not spend an hour to see that they are 
clean. Presently the place comes to look like a 

246 



The Complete Globe-Trotter 

haunted house crossed upon a byre, and the Indian 
hotel is complete. 

So that the tourist wallows in discomfort. He and 
she are, like tourists in most other lands, dazed by the 
unfamiliar into all-accepting meekness. Most of them 
did not know where India was till they arrived there. 
They carry in their pocket-books a piece of paper, 
whereon Mr. Cook, pitying the lost sheep, has written 
down the names of the places they are to go to, with 
the times of the trains by which they are to arrive 
and leave. They bring native servants — or is it that 
native masters bring them ? — who show them such 
sights as can be compassed without walking, and then 
smoke and doze under the back verandah of the hotel, 
while their wards smoke and doze under the front. 
As a rule the tourist is too broken-spirited even to 
dress for dinner ; how, then, should he complain of a 
hotel ? He would sleep with his feet on the pillow if 
that were more convenient to his servant, and remark 
on it next morning at breakfast as a new peculiarity 
of Indian life. At intervals of days an observation 
will strike a spark on the petrifaction of his mind : 
he will flicker with intelligence and remark, " What a 
number of tombs and mosques and temples there seem 
to be in this country ! " If you counter with the 
suggestion that there are a good many gravestones 
and churches and chapels at home, he agrees ; but 
then that is a civilised and highly-populated country. 
As for India, he opines that the population must hav^ 

247 



The Complete Globe-Trotter 

been much greater in those days — " those days '* 
stretch, roughly, from o to 1700 a. d. — for that in 
these days the country parts seem quite deserted. 
There are, as a matter of fact, only 240,000,000 
people " in the country parts " — and the Anglo-Indian 
is disappointed because the tourist does not appreciate 
his work ! 

India, to put it summarily, does not exist for the 
casual stranger, nor yet for the European at all, but 
for the native. You may say, broadly, that everything 
w^hich only the European wants is bad, while every- 
thing the native wants is good. The native has taken 
up with enthusiasm the recreation of railway travelling, 
and the Indian railways are accordingly admirable. 
They lack only one point of excellence, and that is 
exactly what the European wants and the native does 
not — speed. The white man is often in a hurry, the 
native never : the Indian train strolls accordingly at a 
decorous twenty miles an hour. The sahib may get 
impatient, but it is lightning to people whose national 
conveyance is a bullock-cart. The native troubles 
himself nothing about time-tables : he goes to the 
station before sunrise and sits down till the train 
comes ; and the amount of native traffic is astonish- 
ing — astonishing even though it costs him about a 
farthing a mile. The station-yard and the road beyond 
are a fair by day and a doss-house by night j at the 
opening of the gates the roaring, jabbering platform 
recalls the breaking of the crowd when the Lord 

248 



The Complete Globe-Trotter 

Mayor's Show has gone by. The third-class carriages 
are even as crates of fowls : some stand on the seats, 
some lie on the floor. You see only a jungle of heads 
and legs and arms projected vaguely out of nowhere. 
At night the compartment is a heap of sack-coloured 
bundles that might indifferently be men or mail-bags. 
Your own Indian railway carriage is not unlike the 
Indian house. It has space and all indispensables for 
existing in a bad climate, but little of finish or embel- 
lishment. In Europe the sleeping-car mimics the 
drawing-room ; in India, where often the very drawing- 
room is but a halting-place in a perpetual journey, a 
sleeping-car is merely a car you can very well sleep in. 
To it, as everywhere in India, you bring your own 
bedding and your own servant to lay it out. You 
take your meals at stations by the way 5 if there is no 
refreshment-room at the right time and place, you 
bring your food with you. The European train is like 
a hotel ; the Indian like a camp. Your servant piles 
in your canvas bundle of bedding, your battered dress- 
ing-case, your hat-box, your despatch-box, your topi, 
your stick, your flask, your tiffin-basket, your over- 
coat, your cricket-bat, your racquet, your hunting- 
crop, your gun, and your dog ; you insert yourself 
among them and away you go. 

The Indian train may not be sumptuously capari- 
soned, but it is workmanlike to the uttermost hat-peg. 
On the metre-gauge lines you are a little cramped at 
night, inevitably ; on the broad-gauge there is f^r 

249 



The Complete Globe-Trotter 

more dressing, washing, and shaving space than on 
any line in Europe or America. Against the hot 
weather screens of boarding hang from the carriage 
roof to midway down the window; these stall ofF 
some of the dust, while most of the windows are 
smoked to cool the glare. Ice can be had at 
important stations during the hot months. In the 
more civilised parts a boy with ice and mineral 
waters actually travels in the train with you. As a 
rule there is a servants' compartment contiguous to 
your own ; on the South Indian Railway they have 
a sort of ticket-window through which you can bid 
him minister to you. Another vast convenience is 
the railway waiting-room. You arrive, let us say, at 
six, and take a cup of tea; w^hile you drink that a 
shave and a hot bath are preparing in the waiting- 
room ; while you take those, breakfast is cooking in 
the kitchen. You go forth and do what you came 
for. Then, having an hour to spare, you can sit 
down and minister to the public mind from a better 
chair and table and room altogether than, I doubt, you 
will find in any hotel in India. 

In short, your Briton is not at all the conservative 
creature that at home he would make himself out. 
Put him down where he has more or less of a clear 
field, and he will adapt and invent and contrive and 
tolerate the usefully ugly with the best of them. The 
small convenience, for example, of carriages coloured 
according to their class, now timidly nibbled at in 

250 



The Complete Globe-Trotter . 

England, has long been familiar to India: first-class is 
white, second dark green, third native-colour. Only 
one fault can I think of in the regulations for Indian 
travel — there are no carriages reserved for men. Con- 
sequently ladies enter in with their husbands, which at 
bedtime brings embarrassments. Once I have actually 
had to ask the stationmaster to put on an extra car- 
riage solely for me to hide my blushes in. 

For the rest you may look forward to your Indian 
travel with much confidence. Besides the train there 
are other delights, — the ferry-boat in the aching cold 
of dawn, the row-boat on the racing canal, the ekka 
over dust-ruts, the tonga and trotting bullocks on a 
metalled road, the tonga and hill-pony over precipices, 
the double-saddled camel over sand-drifts, the elephant 
over everything that comes in the way. The tonga 
is a low, two-wheeled dachsund of a cart, with the 
build of a gun-carriage, wherein you wedge yourself 
between back seat and tail-board and travel among 
the hills, with good ponies and luck, at an average of 
eight miles or so an hour. It is better sport than an 
automobile, as the ponies are seldom broken, and 
sometimes have to be hauled into the desired course 
with a whip-thong twisted round the car and then 
prevented from flinging the whole thing over a cliff 
if Allah so wills. The ekka — which is for natives 
only — is a painted ice-cream barrow with an awning 
above it and a pony before. The elephant — well, 
you may have seen him, and though for my own part 

251 



The Complete Globe-Trotter 

I never considered him as a serious beast till I knew 
him personally in India, you have already heard the 
little I know on that subject. 

As I was saying, you will enjoy your travelling in 
India, if you have so many friends there that you 
never need put foot in a hotel. If you have not, you 
had much better go somewhere else, and leave India 
to worry through by itself. 



252 



XXVIII 
THE HAPPY HOMES OF INDIA 

One letter of introduction, discreetly managed, 
will furnish you with lodging, board, drinks, fire, 
mounts, shooting, fishing, carriages, servants, books, 
flowers, and clothes from one end of India to the 
other. 

I never heard of anybody who was shameless 
enough to do it — I did hear of two Frenchmen who 
went forty days on the strength of letters from a 
native prince neither of them knew — but I am certain 
that, discreetly managed, it could be done. It would 
be better, though not absolutely necessary, to have a 
suit of clothes to start in, and it is not usual for 
your host in giving you his introduction to your next 
host to add a railway ticket. Short of that, Indian 
hospitality is limitless. 

You get out at the station and find a bearded 
Mussulman salaaming over a letter. The letter in- 
forms you that the bearer will do everything — and he 
does. He puts you into a carriage, and an attendant 
or two he has brought with him, after a short, shrill 
controversy with your own servant, grapple with your 
luggage. On the easiest of springs and cushions you 

^53 



The Happy Homes of India 

roll along broad, straight roads, arcaded with trees, 
the dust carefully laid by half-naked watermen sluicing 
out water through the necks of the goatskins on their 
backs. From time to time you pass gateways ; but, 
unless it is evening and lamps are lit, you can only 
guess that there are houses behind the trees. Pres- 
ently you swing through one of these: there appears a 
broad house, too high, it seems, for one storey, too 
low for two, with pillared front, verandahs on all 
sides, and a porte-cochere. They take you to a vast 
bedroom as lofty as the big saloons of a grand hotel, 
laid with matting and rugs, with at least one long, 
cane-seated lounge-chair with forward-jutting arms 
that will serve indifferently as table or leg-rest. In 
the matted bathroom adjoining your hot water is 
waiting for you. A servant, or two, or six, will 
hasten at your command, while your own bearer is 
struggling up with the luggage, and bring you any- 
thing you may be pleased to desire from a newspaper 
to a joint of mutton. 

Next morning you find that the house stands in a 
compound : even Government offices and banks and 
shops possess it. It is a large walled or hedged en- 
closure, part garden, part mews, part village. The 
Indian garden is almost the most pathetic thing in a 
whole land of exile. In the morning the bullocks 
will be hauling at the creaking well, and all the little 
baked squares of light grit wallow under water. The 
native trees and shrubs and plants — huge leaves, 

254 



The Happy Homes of India 

garish petals, heavy perfumes — flourish rankly. But 
the poor little home flowers — the stocks and mignon- 
ette and wallflowers ! They struggle so gallantly to 
pretend that they are happy, to persuade you that this 
is not so very far from England ; and they fail so 
piteously. They will flower in abundant but strag- 
gling blossoms ; but the fierce sun withers the first 
before the next have more than budded. They make 
no foliage, and they are drawn into leggy stalks, all 
out of shape. It is a loving fraud, but a hollow one. 
The very wallflowers cannot be more than exiles. 

In the mews, past the big carriage Walers, the 
Arab hacks and polo ponies thrust trusting heads 
over bars in hopes of carrots, or pluck impatiently at 
their heel-ropes. Then there is the village — a whole 
village of servants in every compound. The prin- 
ciple of division of labour, of one man one job, has 
been taken up by the Indian servant with a grasp and 
thoroughness that would move the despairing envy of 
a modern trade-unionist. Every kind of work re- 
quires its special man, so that a normal Indian house- 
hold is something like the following. The sahib's 
bearer or valet, i ; the memsahib's ayah, or maid, 2 ; 
the khansamah, or head cook and caterer, 3 ; the 
cook's two mates and the scullery-boy, 6 ; the khit- 
magars, or table-servants, 8 ; the tailor, 9 ; the dhobi, 
or washer-man, 10 ; the bhisti, or water-carrier, 
II ; the sweeper, 12; the gardeners, 15 ; the syces, or 
grooms, 19 ; the grass-cutters — for in Indian not only 

255 



The Happy Homes of India 

must you have a groom to each horse, but a grass- 
cutter to each groom — 23. Some add a dog-boy, but 
that savours of luxurious ostentation ; as a rule, the 
sweeper will kindly consent to fill up some of his 
leisure with the care of dogs. 

But that is not all, or nearly all. If the sahib is in 
Government service, you must add from one to three 
munshis, or clerks, and from two to four chaprassis. 
These are a kind of cross between messengers and 
lictors : their scarlet coats and sashes are symbols of 
the presence of the Sirkar. A small man may have 
no more than two ; a Lieutenant-Governor will have 
four tongas full, and a Viceroy, I infer, a special train- 
ful. How many red chaprassis there must be in the 
whole of India it beggars statistics to compute. That 
brings us up to a household of thirty. If the sahib is 
in camp, as nearly everybody in India is for a part of 
the year, he will probably have a double set of tents, 
of which one goes on by day to be ready for him next 
morning. That means an extra bhisti and an extra 
sweeper, say a dozen tent-pitchers, and the same num- 
ber of camel- or bullock-drivers. Grand total, fifty- 
six persons to attend on one married couple. 

Arrogant satrap ! you cry. But it is not the sa- 
trap's fault. On the contrary, his household is the 
curse of his life and of his memsahib's. As each 
servant takes a new wife, he wants space in the com- 
pound to run up a wicker-screen round her; hence, 
and from other sources, perpetual quarrels. Perhaps 

256 



The Happy Homes of India 

the sahib, as yet unbroken, desires to have half as 
many servants with double the w^ork and double the 
pay. He may argue and beseech and svi^ear: he 
might as well hold a public disputation with a bullock- 
team. The servant prostrates himself and says, " O 
Presence, it is not the custom." 

If you question the memsahib of the ordering of her 
household, you will find that she knows very little 
about it. She knows that the bearer is supposed to 
dust the drawing-room and does not, and that the 
khansamah presents a monthly account. This ac- 
count is almost the most wondrous thing in India. A 
khansamah who knows his business fits it to the 
sahib's income with undeviating precision. Servants 
at home know everything ; in India they know yet 
more. The quiet men who wait at table know more 
English than they pretend ; usually there is somebody 
in the house who can read English letters. Anglo- 
Indian life is all under verandahs, behind open win- 
dows, transparent blinds, and doors that will not shut. 
Also every servant knows every other servant, as well 
as the clerks at the bank and in the Government 
offices ; therefore a man will first hear of his impend- 
ing promotion or transfer from his bearer. And when 
he is promoted, his wife, hoping to save money to eke 
out the ever-nearer retirement pension, will discover 
that the expenses have risen in exact proportion to 
the rise of pay. "The Presence has more pay 
now,'* says the virtuous khansamah. " Does it be- 

257 



The Happy Homes of India 

come the Presence to live like a mere assistant-com- 
missioner? I have seen many sahibs, and I know 
vi^hat is fitting." 

Where does it go to ? Do not ask, but count from 
time to time the bangles on the ankles of the khan- 
samah's leading wife. You will notice that they en- 
large and multiply. The word for this process is 
dastur ; in French it is spelt mes sous^ and in English 
" housekeeper's discount." You may say confidently 
that no money changes hands between the sahib and a 
native without it has borne commission. " What is 
the price in the bazaar of a tin pail ? " the memsahib 
asks of a chaprassi. " God knows. I am a poor 
man. Yet by making inquiries it can be known." 
So he disappears round the corner, where waits the 
pail merchant, and by making inquiries it is known. 
Every man has his pice. 

But if the rich man's expenses increase with his 
pay, the poor man's remain steady. The pinched 
married subaltern gets exactly the same food and 
servants and everything else as the plump commis- 
sioner. The Indian servant may be a tyrant, but he 
is also a providence. He asks no more than your 
all : give him that honestly, and he will see that you 
want for nothing. His honour is in his sahib and 
his sahib's establishment. It is his pride that he 
never steals contrary to custom : he will take half a 
farthing commission on the expenditure of 2d., but he 
is safe as the grave with your whole month's pay in 

258 



The Happy Homes of India 

his pocket. When the exile is over, and the sahib 
returns across the black water, the bearer weeps quite 
sincerely. " Behold I am grown old in the service of 
the Presence. The Presence is my father and mother : 
what now shall this dust-like one do ? " Then one 
day, in the riced-and-buttered ease of his native 
village, he hears that his old master's son is on the 
way to India. God knows how, but he hears it. 
And when the boy lands at Bombay, an old man 
creeps up to him bearing a chit from his father. " Be- 
hold it would be a shame to me if any but me should 
be the Presence's bearer, seeing that I have many 
times held him on my knee when he was so high." 
So he is the Presence's bearer. The old man, who 
had retired rich for life from a general's establishment, 
begins again in a subaltern's quarters and serves the 
young sahib till his infirmities will let him serve no 
longer. Then he goes back to his village again with 
a pension, and sends his son to serve the Presence in- 
stead. 

The bearer and khansamah may well take loads 
on themselves, for there are agonies in Indian house- 
keeping which must fall on the memsahib alone. 
How would you like to do your shopping at a thou- 
sand miles' range ? Except in Madras, Bombay, and 
Calcutta there is hardly a possible shop in India. 
You must think what you want, and order it a fort- 
night in advance ; even so, it will probably arrive 
a fortnight late. And then, if people are coming to 

259 



The Happy Homes of India 

stay over Christmas. ... I have heard of a 
Resident's wife who had to send two hundred miles 
for a flock of sheep for the needs of her house-party, 
and then the local Brahmans intercepted them and put 
them in the pound ; and religion ordains that what 
has once been in the pound can never be slaughtered. 

There are other sorrows. Go into the Indian 
drawing-room : it is shady and cool and charming, 
but nearly always it seems a little bare. The rest of 
the furniture — the pretty nothings — are packed in 
boxes at depots in Calcutta or Bombay or Pindi. 
The piano is staying with a friend, and the silver has 
not yet come back from the bank. Leave one year 
and transfer the next, camp next month, and an im- 
perative change to the hills for the memsahib the hot 
weather after that — the Indian house is ever a place 
of transition. It is a mere caravanserai — a double 
exile. The Anglo-Indian has not even a fixed place 
of banishment. It is not enough that the mother 
must send away her children : she may not even live 
with her furniture. 

In this fugitive encampment on alien soil the very 
order of meals is shaken. When it is hot you rise 
before dawn and take your chota hazri of tea and 
toast. Then for your ride, your bicycle spin, your 
game of racquets in the first hours of the sun. Then 
home to dress, and then breakfast, and then a day's 
work through the long, long heat and glare. Tiffin 
you have no stomach for, and so you wait for tea. 

260 



The Happy Homes of India 

After that life is bearable again : there is air if you 
only gasp hard enough. There is the drive by the 
Hughli at Calcutta, on the shore of Back Bay at Bom- 
bay, on the Marina at Madras. Then for men the 
club : in smaller stations the club is free to women 
also. All prepare for dinner with billiards or bad- 
minton, which is battledore and shuttlecock over a 
net. Then dinner under the punkah ; or maybe it is 
dance night, and everybody forgets hot to-day and 
hotter to-morrow and the whole weary year. 

Sunday brings little respite. Man has his week's 
arrears of work. For woman, if she cares, there is 
church at the big station ; and in the small the little 
Scotch missionary, or the Resident, or the Deputy- 
Commissioner reading the service In a drawing-room 
to his wife and his assistant and the engineer's wife 
— the engineer is out on the canal, and the doctor is 
a native— the railway-man and his wife and his 
children. It does your heart good to see how the 
missionary enjoys his sermon — the one taste of theo- 
logical Scotland in his week of stupid scholars and 
stupider patients ; It does you good to hear the rail- 
way-man growl out the hymns of his childhood. 

There Is one day yet more sacred than Sunday — 
mall-day. Nobody makes calls that day : nobody is 
to be seen ; next day is a sort of lazy holiday. 
Everybody hates mail-day, they tell youj nobody 
misses It. Across five thousand miles. 
Still It is something. 

261 



XXIX 

THE CASE OF REBELLIOUS POONA 

Balkrishna, Wasudeo, and Ranade lie in the cen- 
tral jail, two miles out of Poona. This is in June, 
and they have been there since early March ; some 
day between now and the reading of these pages they 
will have been hanged by the neck until they were 
dead. 

They are the last — some think; others think not 
the last — of the gang which on Jubilee night in 1897, 
headed by their elder brother, Damodher, murdered 
Mr. Rand and Lieutenant Ayerst. Since then two 
of the witnesses against Damodher, who was hanged, 
have been murdered ; attempts have been made on 
others ; and Wasudeo — aged seventeen, and a student, 
if I mistake not, at the same college which educated 
this year's Senior Wrangler — crowned his career by 
firing a pistol at the magistrate in open court. These 
crimes, added to trials for seditious writing and speech, 
such as those of Tilak and the brothers Natu, to diffi- 
culties between soldiers and people over plague work, 
and to reckless calumnies about the behaviour of Brit- 
ish soldiers at that time, have given Poona the most 

262 



The Case of Rebellious Poona 

evil reputation in India. Here is one centre in India 
which seems thoroughly and irreconcilably disaffected. 
A Poona Brahman is the type all over India of ser- 
pentine cunning and malignancy. " Poona was al- 
ways a nasty place," I remember hearing an old 
engine-driver say years ago, when I hardly knew 
where Poona was. " It seemed different from other 
places, somehow. You didn't know what those chaps 
were up to. You didn't quite know where it was, 
but there it was. It was a nasty place." That sums 
up the general opinion about Poona with most accu- 
rate vagueness. Nobody quite knows what it is, but 
everybody is quite sure it is something. So Poona 
has a bad name, and from time to time bits of it are 
hanged. 

There ought, you feel, to be some definite and 
tangible reason. But if there is I do not know it; 
and, though I have sought, I have not met the Euro- 
pean or the native that can tell it me. Except for 
the murders, and the obviously widespread sympathy 
which permitted and screened them, Poona seems to 
have done no wrong beyond Calcutta or Lahore ; ex- 
cept for the fine imposed by the quartering of extra 
troops on it after the murders, Poona seems to have 
suffered nothing beyond Bombay or Madras. Yet, 
when you leave searching for specific causes and fall 
back on general grounds of discontent, the case be- 
comes plainer. Poona is the ancient capital of the 
Marathas, and there are a score of reasons why the 

263 



The Case of Rebellious Poona 

Marathas should chafe under British rule more than 
any other people of India. 

We must go back, after the fashion of the official 
reports, to the days of Aurungzebe. You must bear 
in mind that it was from the Marathas and the Sikhs, 
from Hindus not from Mussulmans, that we actually 
conquered India. At the beginning of the eighteenth 
century the Mogul empire began to fall to pieces with 
the death of Aurungzebe. The Marathas and Sikhs 
were the Hindu reaction. Spreading from Western 
India, the Marathas overran the whole peninsula from 
the Punjab to Bengal. They made the Emperor of 
Delhi their prisoner, and governed and raided in his 
name ; Maratha chiefs founded the dynasties of Scin- 
dia, Holkar, and Baroda ; but the head of their con- 
federacy was always the Peshwa of Poona. In 1789 
they captured Delhi itself. According to the ordinary 
run of India's history they would in due time have 
been subjugated by some hardier race from the north. 
But the Sikhs formed a temporary barrier against the 
Mussulman hordes ; and the death-blow of the Mara- 
thas therefore came from the other side — from the sea 
and the British. In two desperate wars, not unshad- 
owed by British defeats, they lost, first Delhi in 1803, 
and then, fifteen years later, Poona itself. After about 
a century of rule the Maratha empire collapsed as 
swiftly as it had risen. 

Other provinces of India were ceded to us or con- 
quered from alien lords ; the Marathas lost their all in 

264 



The Case of Rebellious Poona 

war. So, later, did the Sikhs j but while the Sikhs 
have long since reconciled themselves to our dominion, 
the Marathas have never forgotten how high they 
were less than a hundred years ago, and who it was 
that brought them low. They lost more than others, 
and they feel the loss more. For others we were a 
change of masters 5 them we brought down from 
masters to slaves. 

The case of the Marathas offers an unhappy and 
unique combination of everything that can embitter 
subjection. They were gallant warriors, if wanting 
stamina ; they were also patriots, devotees, and a peo- 
ple of an extraordinary acuteness of intellect. The 
Rohillas, whom we conquered, were as gallant war- 
riors ; but they were adventurers, not a nation. The 
Ghurkhas, from whom we captured provinces, were 
both gallant and patriotic ; but they were careless of 
religion, while to the straitly Hindu Marathas the 
very existence of British rule is a compulsion to daily 
impiety. The Sikh is brave, patriotic, and religious ; 
but he is simple and unlettered, and easily forgets a 
beating in the satisfaction of having fought a good 
fight. The Maratha, more introspective, hugs the 
smart of defeat. The Bengali vaunts as acute a mind 
— at least until it comes to action, — but he has for- 
gotten what it is to be free. Each has his compensa- 
tion, except the Maratha. His empire, his nationality, 
his religion, his honour, his beautiful language — we 
have taken away his all. 

265 



The Case of Rebellious Poona 

It is not our fault. Some of his complaints are 
even grotesquely self-destructive. For example, he 
seizes greedily on English education to fit himself for 
political and journalistic attacks upon us, and in elabo- 
rate Macaulayesque periods complains that the Eng- 
lish tongue is killing the Marathi. Another of the 
Brahman's grievances is that he is poor ; yet when he 
gets a Government post that would be great wealth 
for one, he divides it into pittances for a score of 
brothers and sisters, and uncles and aunts, and second- 
cousins, who all come to live in his house. This is 
his religion, and it is a most unselfish one ; but it is 
his doing, not ours. Yet with all their illogic his com- 
plaints are sincere. The Maratha really does think 
himself most ill-used. He seems to bear a vinegar 
disposition on his very features. The type is very 
well marked as you meet it on descending from the 
north — a shaven head that looks small and square 
under its peony turban ; a skin so darkly brown that 
it almost amounts to a scowl in itself; brows that 
press down on the gleaming eyes in a perpetual frown ; 
a small, rather formless nose, often almost snub ; a 
black or grey moustache that turns down stifily over 
the corners of a tight-drawn mouth, — a face full of 
character, but of bad character. The harsh brows 
and precise moustache convey somehow a look of 
sour self-righteousness. The Maratha looks as if he 
were ever brooding over wrongs most undeserved. 
^' These people," he is saying, " will all be damned 

266 



The Case of Rebellious Poona 

when I am in heaven ; and yet they rule me, and I 
cannot shake them off." 

That at least is certain : he cannot shake us off. 
The Government of India had a bad turn of nervous- 
ness after the Jubilee murders ; but it is safe to say 
that there w^ill never be another Indian Mutiny with- 
out aid from outside ; and if there were, it would not 
be the Marathas who could profit by it. Failing that, 
their discontent finds its vent in what a Brahman I 
consulted on the subject called " a vague feeling of 
unrest — with undercurrents." He himself was of the 
moderate party who favour reforms in Hinduism and 
constitutional methods of political agitation — agitation 
for what, they have not yet quite settled. The ex- 
tremists — such as the now notorious Tilak — are the 
undercurrents. They find a vent for their vague feel- 
ing of unrest in kindling religious animosities among 
the common people. The common people, of course, 
have long ceased to sigh for the glories of Shivaji, 
hero and traitor, or for the great days of raid and em- 
pire : it was not they, we may conjecture, who got 
the best of the loot. But they cling like limpets to 
their religion. Compared with Orientals, we Western 
people do not know what religion is : Hinduism pre- 
scribes and enters into every single act in the lives of 
those who profess it. It tells them what to eat, what 
to drink, wherewithal to be clothed, whom to marry, 
whom not to touch with so much as their shadows. 
You may call it unspiritual — religion fossilised into 

267 



The Case of Rebellious Poona 

unmeaning, stupid custom — yet it is their all, and they 
prize it beyond life. The Hindu, in a sense which 
the West cannot even comprehend, does all things to 
the glory — or the reverse — of God. 

Now a simple thing like travelling in a tramcar is 
quite sufficient to defile a Hindu, if a defiling person 
happens also to be in that tramcar. Therefore you 
will see that the kind of improvements we have intro- 
duced into India are fertile of religious offence, and 
might in the long-run be fatal to Hinduism in its tra- 
ditional form. That is why the better kind of Brah- 
man favours a modification of the creed — it is really 
a life rather than a creed — and the worse sees his 
opportunity in doing all he can to keep it as rigid and 
formal as possible. A short while ago, for example, 
a quarrel occurred in Poona between Hindus and 
Mussulmans. In other parts of India Hindu proces- 
sions are not allowed to pass mosques with cymbals 
and tom-toms during the festival of the Moharram. 
In Poona it had not hitherto been forbidden. But 
now the Mussulmans applied for its prohibition, and, 
in accord with the usage of other cities, jingling and 
tom-tomming was prohibited during that explosive 
and fanatical time. Thereon Tilak and his friends 
must get up a sort of Moharram of their own — a 
Hindu festival very similar to the Moslem one, except 
that it has no history and no meaning. 

It happened not to matter, and now both sects join 
without prejudice in each other's tom-toming, as be- 

268 



The Case of Rebellious Poona 

fore the quarrel. As usual, nobody suffered but the 
doubly-deafened European. Yet this illustrates the 
attitude of the extreme Brahmans. Their game is to 
load the overloaded religion with more and more 
meaningless observances, in the hope that they may 
somehow one day lead to strife. To such the out- 
break of plague in 1897 ^"^ ^^^ employment of Brit- 
ish troops on house-to-house examination was a 
golden chance. The use of them may or may not 
have been wise. A knowledge of the Marathi lan- 
guage and of Hindu domestic ceremonial is not among 
the accomplishments for which we pay Atkins a shil- 
ling a-day, and he may have been wanting in tact. He 
generally lives away in cantonments, and his appear- 
ance in force in the native city was by itself disquiet- 
ing to the timid coolie. On the other hand, some- 
body had to do the work, and with sanitary work 
even the most Europeanised native is hardly ever to 
be trusted. 

If the Brahmans had been honestly desirous of 
doing good to the people they would have volun- 
teered to go round with the soldiers and keep them 
from unconscious offence. Some of them, to their 
great credit and to everybody's satisfaction, have since 
done this. But at the first they preferred to let the 
public health go hang, and make mischief, wherein 
they succeeded richly. 

But it seems that the worst of it is over now. 
Balkrishna, Wasudeo, and Ranade will be hanged by 

269 



The Case of Rebellious Poona 

the neck until they are dead. There is an idea that 
the murderers of Rand and Ayerst were only the in- 
struments of a more powerful backer — somebody who 
furnished money and ideas, but not his carcass. But 
those who know best think that though there was 
much sympathy with them — though they went to 
people and said, " We are going to kill a sahib," and 
they only replied, " Isn't it a bit dangerous ? " — they 
are the last of the gang. To be sure, Tilak's paper 
called them brave and unselfish youths ; but he is the 
kind of man that prefers hallooing capital crimes 
from a distance to putting himself inside the meshes 
of the law. The Maratha Brahman, for a native of 
India, seems singularly unwilling to die. A simple 
ryot, the other day, had said good-bye to his relatives, 
and was pinioned, when suddenly he asked to speak 
again to his brother. " Recollect," he said, " it's 
twenty Kawa seers of barley that man owes me. Not 
Dawa seers " — as you might say imperial pints, not 
reputed. Then he turned and was hanged without 
moving a muscle. Another man, a Pathan, was be- 
ing hanged, when the rope broke. The warder bade 
him go up on to the scajfFold again, but he objected. 
" No," he said ; " I was sentenced to be hanged, and 
hanged I've been." "Not so, friend," argued the 
warder ; " you were sentenced to be hanged until you 
were dead, and you're not dead." It was a new view 
to the Pathan, and he turned to the superintendent, 
" Is that right, Sahib ? " " Yes, that's right." "Very 

270 



The Case of Rebellious Poona 

well ; I didn't understand ; " and he went composedly 
up the steps and was hanged again like a man. But 
it seems that the Brahman, being a more complex 
creature, does not match this superb indifference. 
When Damodher saw the black-railed scaffold his 
knees were loosened ; when they came to fit the 
noose he collapsed in a heap, and had to be supported 
into heaven like a coward. His three followers re- 
ceived their sentence with bravado, but now behind 
the bars they were beginning to go the way Damodher 
went. So that it appears likely that the punishment 
of this gang will prove an effective deterrent against 
any attempts to imitate or avenge them. 

For the rest, plague looks like becoming a regular 
cold-weather visitor to Poona. The hot-weather sun 
killed it this spring ; but the odds are it will recur. 
In any case, the able officers recently in charge of 
the segregations have quite soothed the people's ner- 
vousness. So it may be that the Government and 
Poona will rub along together again for a space, as 
they often have done before for years together. But 
you need not expect the Maratha to like it, and you 
cannot expect the Government to give him back In- 
dia. He will go on looking vinegar, and there is no 
help for it. 



271 



XXX 

THE JAIL 

" Three yellow, five red, two blue," chanted the 
convict behind the growing carpet. " As thou sayest 
so let it be done," chorused the convicts sitting in 
front of it, as they shpped the thread within the warp. 
Opposite them, and further up the long factory, and 
further back and opposite that, rose more chants, and 
after each the vociferation, " As thou sayest so let it 
be done." 

It was a queer sight to come on in the middle of 
the central jail. It sounded from outside half like 
breakers on a shingly shore, and half like a board 
school at the multiplication-table. " That sounds like 
noise, you know," said the superintendent ; " but 
really it's honest toil." Inside was a long aisle of 
looms with many-coloured carpets gradually creeping 
up them. One man called the pattern — the number 
of stitches to be plaited in of each colour; with a 
roar the brown-backed criminals, squatting in a row 
over the carpet, picked out their threads and worked 
them in. " Eight green, two pink." "As thou 
sayest so let it be done." 

The Oriental, as you know, cannot work in con- 

272 



The Jail 

cert unless he chants in concert too. And he has a 
wonderful ear for his own uproar. Here, for instance, 
on the floor were two men bending over the same 
pattern-carpet. One was dictating to a gang on one 
side, the other on the other ; they were at different 
places, and as each bawled out a direction to his men 
the others were revelling in their " So let it be done." 
Yet there was not a mistake in either, though the car- 
pets were only just beginning : each gang must have 
caught every word. At the big fifty-seven-foot car- 
pet, of course, the directions were hardly needed : it 
has been a-making for many months, till the leader 
reels off the colours and numbers by heart, and the 
dozen workers, each opposite his strip of pattern, put 
in the stitches like automata. All the carpet-workers 
are picked men : it is not every malefactor that has the 
brain to take in the directions, or the eye to dis- 
tinguish the colours, or the hand to put them in. 
Such as have prize the work, for it is the only task 
in the central jail at which you are allowed to make a 
noise. 

It is different with the half-hundred or so of 
habitual criminals behind the inner wall which iso- 
lates them from the comparatively innocent. Their 
labour lies in pumping up water for the whole jail. 
In two shifts — half a day each — they tug and strain 
at the cranks — chocolate bodies, stark naked but for 
a wisp of loin-cloth, and shaven heads with one tiny 
tuft left on the top — and only punctuate their toil by 

273 



The Jail 

grunts. These are all men past reformation ; many 
of them are born thieves, and thieves for life. We 
talk of born thieves at home, but our hereditary 
crime is a casual accident compared with India's. 
India has its castes and tribes of thieves, and every 
member of them is born to robbery as naturally and 
inevitably as you are born to your father's name. 
They glory in their calling ; but even if they did not, 
they could follow no other. To steal is not merely a 
social duty, with its own traditions and its language, 
which is never divulged to the outsider, but a very 
religion, with its own thieving god. For a member 
of these tribes to be honest would be an impiety. 
Only occasionally and accidentally can they earn an 
honest living as watchmen against their brothers. For 
India believes literally in setting a thief to catch a 
thief, although to catch he has no need, because his 
brothers abstain so long as his employer gives satisfac- 
tion. Meantime, the watchman himself steals only 
as much as is necessary to keep his hand in, and gen- 
erally returns the loot immediately. He cannot af- 
ford to let himself get rusty, especially if he be a 
bachelor; for the religion will not allow him to be 
married till he has achieved the qualifying number of 
larcenies. 

But even these inbred criminals, together with 
amateurs who equal their unwearied ill-doing, are 
not in this prison set to purposeless labour, such as 
is our crank at home. There is an overflow-pipe, 

274 



The Jail 

which shows in a moment when everything has been 
filled, and if the water rises in that half an hour or 
an hour before the day's end they knock off tri- 
umphant. In any case, pumping water is just the 
work whose utility the native understands. It is bet- 
ter than grinding the air. 

The pump is only for the definitely depraved. But 
every convict on entering must work through a spell 
of heavy labour — stone-breaking for road-metal or 
corn-grinding. The jail, like most at home, is all 
but self-supporting : the assassin grinds the flour for 
his own supper. The mill is like that at which two 
women shall be grinding when one is taken and the 
other left — -a couple of grindstones with a hole and a 
handle in the upper one ; the men's tasks lie in a 
stone bin beside each, and they grind away — a row 
of full-muscled, flour-dusted, bronze statues. On the 
other side of the circle the kitchen swelters in the 
sun — a curving bank of coppers and griddle-plates. 
Up about their rims stroll bare-footed, bare-bodied 
attendants, and prod caldrons of hissing cabbage and 
cauliflower with baulks of timber. " Better vegetables 
than most sahibs get," says the superintendent; and 
if an unrepresentative sahib may judge, it is so in- 
deed. But the bodies of the prisoners are the diet's 
best recommendation — plumper than the ordinary 
villager's, thinner than the ordinary bunnia's. India 
has the convenience that every native's poverty or 
wealth is inscribed on his belly. 

275 



The Jail 

It seems a grim joke to talk of a prison as an 
Arcadia; yet these plump, industrious jail-birds some- 
how gave more impression of happy usefulness than 
a dozen villages. It was so compact, so well ordered, 
so well directed. In the next circle were a couple 
of yards full of bamboo-workers — the men sitting 
under the verandahs with chisel and hammer; inside 
the sheds the long double-row of bare sleeping-banks 
— hard, but scarcely harder than their beds in the 
villages, and. Lord ! how unspeakably cleaner ! While 
dacoity was flourishing a number of Burmans came 
to this jail ; they were set to work on their beautifully 
delicate bamboo tables and chairs and screen-work. 
There are only half a dozen or so left now — little, 
button-nosed, yellow faces among the amber ones — 
but there are enough to teach the Hindus, and do 
the finer work. It was pleasant to see the pride with 
which they displayed the latest masterpiece ; pleasant 
to go into the next yard and see the old, old men — 
too frail to serve out a life sentence of twenty years 
in the field-work of the Andamans — dozing out the 
afternoon over a pretence of twisting yarn. " This 
is the yard I don't like to show to a visitor," says the 
superintendent. "There's almost sure to be some 
breach of discipline — an old chap gone to sleep." 

Yes, it was a pleasant sight, this jail. For you 
must remember that the prisoners are not merely bet- 
ter housed and better fed and better — though hideously 
— clothed than they would be in their villages ; they 

276 



The Jail 

also have no sense whatever of guilt. This prison 
leaves no flavour of crime in the mouth. There is 
no evil conscience and little sullenness. The convict 
really cannot see w^hy the Sirkar should take that 
little affair of killing the co-respondent so seriously ; 
still, it must be accepted as part of the general mad- 
ness of sahibs, and, after all, the place is not such a 
bad one. 

It sounds queer to the home-keeping mind — and 
perhaps queerer still that most of the warders are 
murderers. A simple society like most in India has 
no exaggerated respect for human life, and kills where 
we merely assault or revile ; therefore the murderer, 
judged by the standard of criminal intention, is often 
less guilty than the authors of what we call minor 
crimes. A first offender can rise by merit to be a 
watchman in a blue-and-white cap, and then to be a 
warder in lemon-coloured breeches. Every prisoner, 
by a combination of good work and a blameless walk, 
can purchase remission of sentence, and pay which 
means to him a handsome capital to re-commence life 
with. And the murderer-warders do their work very 
well, especially considering that some of the prisoners 
are millionaires compared with themselves. One 
great point is that many of them are utter foreigners 
to the mass of the convicts. Here is an Arab from 
Aden, there a Shan from Mogaung in Upper Burma, 
there a Pushtu-speaking Pathan from the North- 
western border; in the European quarter is a Greek 

277 



The Jail 

from Zanzibar. It is a microcosm of India, which 
remains conquered because it is divided. 

At certain seasons of public rejoicing Government 
follows the good old oriental custom of opening the 
prison doors — only ajar, and with circumspection. 
"We haven't recovered from the Jubilee yet,'* mourns 
the superintendent: " lost all our best men." Every- 
body released on that auspicious occasion was care- 
fully interrogated to make sure that he understood 
why. As the result, that one simple soul explained 
that after sixty years of reign the Rani had a son. 
Another, more sophisticated, opined that the Rani had 
at last been allowed by her grateful people to retire 
under the long-service regulation. A third argued 
bluntly that it was his right. " People were released 
in '77 and '87; so, of course, I ought to be in 

•97." 

And for the end, there is one spot more which is 
not Arcadia — the European quarter. There is not 
very much of that, thank Heaven ! and what there is 
is not full, and of those there some are not Britons. 
Yet there are a few Britons — and in the drawn faces 
and the eyes that dodge past you what a difference 
from the Arcadians ! You look down yourself and 
hurry on, and almost blush when next you meet the 
first-class assassin in lemon-colour. 

It is all but Arcadia — and then, as always, comes 
the strange, malignant, hardly human twist that 
appears in the native's mind just when you are begin- 

278 



The Jail 

ning to love him. In jail it takes the form of false 
witness and most astonishing malingering. The 
other morning the superintendent, on his round, saw 
through a grille a quarrel between a warder and a 
Brahman. That afternoon the Brahman brought a 
complaint against the warder, and twenty unanimous 
witnesses to prove what the officer's own eyes had 
showed him to be false. Another had been struck by 
a warder, and next morning appeared covered, not 
only with weals, but with raw strips of flesh torn away 
also. The doctor was puzzled, till an ancient warder 
whispered, " Examine their pyjama-strings, Sahib." 
So each man had to bring up the string that runs 
round the waist of his drawers, and the tenth or so 
v/as found covered with blood and skin. The man 
had spent all night at this torture merely to make the 
case sure against his enemy. 

Not less inhuman was the group who pierced their 
thighs with bodkins and strings soaked in oil and 
dung, giving themselves agonising tumours to avoid a 
moderate day's work. Or the men who conceal pills 
to make them ill in holes cut in their flesh — it is too 
sickening to detail. A little needed comic relief was 
furnished by a Sikh, who evidently got forbidden 
opium, though nobody could tell how. At last it was 
observed that his hair — a Sikh's religion forbids the 
cutting of his hair, so this is not done, even in jail 
— was curiously sticky. It was washed, and the re- 
sults analysed, whereon it turned out that the night 

279 



The Jail 

before imminent conviction the Sikh had soaked his 
head in a strong solution of opium. He absorbed 
enough to last him for months, and sucked it off his 
hair by night. 



280 



XXXI 

HYDERABAD, DEKHAN 

I AM in quite a new India — the Dekhan. I can 
see it very characteristically from the temple of Par- 
bati, above Poona-^characteristically in every way. 

A highly educated Brahman shows me eight-armed 
goddesses and elephant-headed gods, compared with 
which a penny doll is artistic and spiritual ; then adds 
in his gusty Marathi head-voice, " Here-is-the-historic- 
window. From-which-the-Peshwa-surveyed-the-bat- 
tle - of-Kirkee. Which-resulted-in-his-conquest-by- 
the-British. You-can-command-an-extensive-view." 
And if I loiter — " Command-the-view ! " he urges 
encouragingly. I hastily command it — Poona city 
and cantonment and the lines of Kirkee, all cloaked 
in trees, looking immense, like all Indian cities. 
They lie on a rumpled carpet of grey-brown, sun- 
burned down, with a ring of low, grey, stony moun- 
tain enclosing it. Only here and there, where thiere 
is water, the grey is lit up with vividest green — 
emerald lines where a canal runs, or emerald squares 
of irrigated field. And here and there are spots of 
vermilion and red-lead — the wonderful gold-mohur- 
tree, whose blossoms clothe it in spring, and glow 

281 



Hyderabad, Dekhan 

ever more fiercely with the fiercer sun, till it looks 
like a tree hidden in butterflies. Uneven, colourless 
tableland, undecided shapes of colourless mountain, 
gemmed here and there with dazzling green and scar- 
let — that is the type of the whole vast triangle of the 
Dekhan. 

On the way to Hyderabad you roll through nearly 
four hundred miles of it with scarce an incident. It 
looks like a tableland, as it is ; at this season it also 
looks worthless land, as it is not. Potentially, say 
men who ought to know, the Nizam's territory is of 
the richest in India. You notice at once the wealth 
of cattle — thousands on thousands, satin-skinned, 
melting-eyed, humped little beasts, with long horns 
that stand straight up over their foreheads like the 
frame of a lyre. The scantily watered soil grows few 
crops, but it affords copious pasture of the frugal 
Eastern kind. The people are astonishingly well-to- 
do. A plague-officer told me that he visited a small 
town off the railway, where hardly a white man had 
ever been, and found there the most prosperous popu- 
lation he ever saw. Everybody had enough of every- 
thing ; and, as this land was well irrigated, the one 
agent of Ralli Brothers, the great merchants of India, 
enjoyed a lucrative monopoly in cotton. These happy 
villagers, on the first sign of plague, had independently 
isolated themselves — shut up their houses, and put up 
a temporary town in the fields. They deserve their 
prosperity. Besides the crops and the cattle, enthusi- 

282 



Hyderabad, Dekhan 

asts believe there is enough gold in Hyderabad State 
to cut the throat of Klondike and beggar the Rand. 
I have heard the same of Utah, Tibet, Madagascar, 
the Libyan Desert, and the bottom of the sea ; yet 
who knows ? 

At a station, through the sun-shutters, there swept 
a sudden volley of yells, imprecations, shrieks, groans, 
gibbers. The native of India can make himself heard 
when it is a question of giving or receiving the third 
part of a farthing ; yet surely but one race on earth 
can make such music as this. I looked out, and — 
yes : it was Arabs. A gang of half a dozen, bril- 
liantly dishevelled, a faggot of daggers with an antique 
pistol or two in each belt, and a six-foot matchlock on 
each shoulder. For Hyderabad, you must know, is 
full of Arabs. They serve as irregular troops there, 
and it must be owned that if irregularity is what you 
want, no man on earth can supply it better. Presently 
there got into the carriage an Arab chief, a big man in 
breeches and gaiters, a revolver and a fez ; his family 
have been feudal lords under the Nizam for genera- 
tions. The fez appeared to be the fashionable head- 
dress hereabouts ; even the railway guard wore one 
over the black curls that greased his official collar. 
I observed that the railway tickets in this country are 
stamped with a crescent. Next I noticed a Sikh with 
his hair tied into a bob ; then a vulture-beaked 
Pathan ; then a group of half-a-dozen soldiers in ill- 
fitting khaki, each with a different badge on his chain- 

283 



Hyderabad, Dekhan 

mail epaulettes. The civilian, hugging his corded 
bundle cased in a blue-and-red-striped rug — the 
badge of the Indian third-class passenger — also cher- 
ished under his arm a cavalry sabre. Everyvv^here 
I breathed Islam and the Middle Ages : vi^as I not 
coming to Hyderabad, the last stronghold of medi- 
evalism in Southern India ? 

Its threshold is of a piece with it. The train had 
caught the local atmosphere, and was forty minutes 
late. For an hour we had been running through his 
Highness's huge preserves — grey leafless bush and 
coppice, spangled with gold-mohur-trees. Now on 
either side rose dump-heaps of grey-black boulders as 
large as houses — obelisks, walls, hemispheres, mush- 
rooms, uprights and cross-bars, formless jumbles as 
if a baby Titan had been playing at Stonehenge. 
Little lonely domes appeared below them, then flat- 
roofed houses, then broken lines of suburbs. Next 
came a broad blue lake, with round-headed trees low 
on its farther shore, and a long white palace at its far 
end — a mirage made substance. Then a broad plat- 
form, full of men, armed with Martinis and match- 
locks, bayonets and scimitars, in khaki and blue and 
amber and green and carnation. Then broad streets, 
with broughams and servants in gold-lace, with bul- 
lock-carts and beggars in ashes. Then a hotel with a 
large compound and a deep terrace in front, two 
flights of broad steps to the door, the naked slate of a 
dismantled billiard-table within, dinner laid outdoors 

284 



Hyderabad, Dekhan 

for eight, and I the only guest. There was spacious 
profusion in every detail of Hyderabad. 

Next day — of course with two horses, and one 
footman to fold his arms on the box, and another to 
run in, front and push cattle out of the way — I drove 
out to see Golconda. Although the diamonds were 
never found there, and are cut there no longer, the 
opulent name of Golconda suits well with Hydera- 
bad. What is there now — the fort and tombs of the 
kings who reigned here before the Nizams — is not 
less barbarically vast. You drive among the littered 
Titan toys till you find yourself heading for one higher 
hill. It looks like the rest of them — a dump-heap of 
the world's raw material — till suddenly you are driv- 
ing through a lofty arched gate with guard-houses. 
Inside are lines, some ruinous, some alive with 
soldiers and soldiers' families ; you drive and drive 
through a great city. Presently another tall gateway, 
with more guard-houses ; you go through, and are at 
the foot of the hill. 

Then you see it is only half a hill and half a build- 
ing. Men have filled up the gaps in God's dump- 
heap. You climb between walls that eke out cliff^s, 
turn descents into scarps, slopes into ramps, make 
curtains of cromlechs and bastions of rocking-stones. 
They are true cyclopean walls — huge unfaced stones 
laid as they will fit, without mortar. You doubt 
which is the ruder and more massive — man's work or 
Nature's. But when you struggle to the top you see 

285 



Hyderabad, Dekhan 

that Nature is avenged on her improvers. Nature's 
chaos still stands ; man's is as chaotic, and less stable. 
From the roof of a ruined palace you look out over a 
tossing sea of broken masonry. You can trace the 
line of the rough outer vv^all, still hardly broken, 
dwindling and narrowing below you, dipping into a 
depression, climbing again as a thread across a rise — 
the mummied skin of what was a teeming city. 
Within it the bones sear and gape and crackle under 
the pitiless exposing sun. Palace and mosque, armoury 
and treasure-house, they are all gone. Only remains 
a shapeless waste of stones, almost as rough, and not 
so substantial, as the huddled granite that was before 
them and remains after. Two miles away rises a 
heap of boulders about as high ; two miles from either 
you could not tell which was fabulous Golconda and 
which was creation's lumber. 

Nothing remains whole, except the tombs. Great 
domed chambers, square without, octagonal within, 
vague wistful suggestions of the Taj without its beau- 
ties, they lie grouped in the plain below, stripped of 
their embelHshments, crumbling and forlorn, kept 
standing by the alms of the kings that have succeeded 
to their glories. Ghosts of the dead past — and that 
is all there is of Golconda. 

But Golconda is nothing to us that we should weep 
for it; which of us ever heard of the Kutb Shahi 
kings, of Mohammed Kuli and his beautiful favourite, 
Bagmati ? Come, instead, into living Hyderabad. 

286 



Hyderabad, Dekhan 

Scale the sheer elephant that awaits you, and seesaw 
along streets as gay as a ballet. A mingling of in- 
cense and cinnamon, sugar and civet and dirt — the 
pure smell of India — deliciously fills the air all about 
you. There is little dirt either : the regular terraces 
of houses — ^you look into the upper-storey windows as 
you pass — the plain tall arches across the roadway, 
the four elaborate minarets whence diverge the four 
broad, thronged main streets : it is all orderly and 
bright and spacious, as befits Hyderabad — an Asiatic 
Place de I'Etoile. 

Along the street comes a tiny boy held on to a 
pony. He lifts a vague salaaming hand towards the 
fez that sits above his solemn little yellow face. Be- 
hind him is an escort of half-a-dozen lancers, and you 
naturally conclude that he is of the Royal family. 
But he is only the son of one of the nobles, and the 
lancers behind him are his father's. Everybody who 
is anybody in Hyderabad has a little army of his own. 
In the city and cantonments — it is a dozen miles from 
one end of them to the other — are eight distinct kinds 
of troops. These are the British and the British na- 
tive, the Hyderabad contingent — four cavalry regi- 
ments, four field-batteries, and six battalions, main- 
tained and officered by us for the Nizam in return for 
the province of Berar — the Imperial Service Troops, 
the Nizam's regular troops, the Nizam's irregular 
troops, the Nizam's female troops, and the private 
feudal irregulars. Of the irregulars, many represent 

287 



Hyderabad, Dekhan 

corps originally raised and led by French officers ; 
some of them still preserve a kind of French in their 
words of command, which only one native in Hyder- 
abad understands. The Arab irregulars are brought 
over to serve their time, and then sent back to Ara- 
bia; there is one at this moment who is a subaltern in 
Hyderabad, but as soon as he crosses the British bor- 
der gets a salute of nine guns : he is a sheikh in his 
own country, near Aden. As for the woman's bat- 
talion — alas ! I could not see it paraded, since it is 
quartered in his Highness's zenana. But think of it 
— of the sheer joy of riding on an elephant through a 
city where they still maintain a Royal Regiment of 
Amazons ! 

As you pad-pad along through the panorama of In- 
dian types and the spectroscope of Indian colours, the 
sound of tom-toms floats up. Down the street, be- 
yond the four minarets, you see an elephant, then a 
squibbing flame, and the scent of black powder is in 
the air. A fight ? No, a wedding, which is even 
more Hyderabadi — a procession that seems to stretch 
through the whole ten miles of city. First half-a- 
dozen men letting off fireworks and tapping tom-toms, 
then a towering, red-coated, gilt-tusked elephant bear- 
ing standards. After that a band, and then the 
family troops. The infantry had a semblance of uni- 
form — a flat Ghurkha cap with " i " on it : presum- 
ably they were the bridegroom's First Foot. But the 
irregular cavalry was superb, riding two and two all 

288 



Hyderabad, Dekhan 

over the street like a circus — big Afghans, desert 
pilots from Arabia, Rathore Rajputs, and sheer black 
savages from Fashoda way ; boys and old men in grey 
beards and spectacles, half-bred Walers and country- 
bred rats and living skeletons almost too lame to hob- 
ble, lances and sabres and carbines, and flintlock pistols 
and yataghans and switches. Then more elephants, 
more troops, more musicians, and the bridegroom 
under a great crimson canopy. Tom-tom-tom-tom 
— squeal and clatter from a horse that hates elephants 
— fiz-z-z-z from a squib. 

Hyderabad seems too good to be true. It is not so 
much a city as a masque of medieval Asia. 



289 



XXXII 

MADRAS 

At last ! I arrive in Madras, and here at last is the 
India that was expected — the India of our childhood 
and of our dreams. 

The endless corn-fields of Hindustan, the rolling 
dry downs of the Dekhan — and then in a night every- 
thing has changed. The air is moist, the sky intensely 
blue. You drive on broad roads of red sand, through 
colonnades of red-berried banyans and thick groves of 
dipping palms. In pools and streams of soft green 
water men fish with rods, only their black heads above 
the surface ; at the edge slate-coloured bafFaloes 
wallow to the muzzle. 

And the people are just as you have always seen 
them in your mind. Naked above the loins, petti- 
coated below, any colour from ochre to umber, sharp- 
featured and quick-eyed, with heads close-clipped be- 
fore and streaming with ragged locks behind ; the fat 
Brahman under his white umbrella, and the moist- 
backed waterman under the jars swung from his bam- 
boo pole, — they pass by in a perpetual panorama of 
India — popular India, missionary India — India as you 
knew it before you came. 

290 



Madras 

It never struck me before, but it is certainly so: 
our picture of India at home is the reflection of 
Madras. You never thought of India as barley-fields 
and big men in sheepskins ; but toddy palms, rice- 
stalks standing in water, lithe little coolies in loin- 
clothes — all these you have known from a baby. The 
reason is that Madras is the oldest, the most historic 
province of British India, and the nursery does not 
change its ideas lightly. Moreover, the nursery looks 
for its Indian literature mostly to missionaries, and 
the missionary has taken a far firmer hold on Madras 
than elsewhere. I am convinced that Little Henry's 
Bearer was a Madrasi. 

The loyal nursery clings to Madras ; the rest of 
India calls it " the dark Presidency,'* and affects to 
despise it. Nobody can deny that it was the first 
province where British arms began to overthrow all 
comers. Who can forget Clive and Dupleix, and 
Coote and Hyder Ali, and Tippu and the Nabob of 
Arcot's debts ? But they say up North that Madras's 
future lies all behind it. I came there against the 
strongest advice of the very best authorities on the 
Khyber and Waziristan — came, saw, and was con- 
quered. 

For to the transient loiterer Madras appears by far 
the most desirable of the great cities of India. In 
Madras there appears to be room to live. In Bombay 
you camp in a tent ; in Calcutta you contract your 
elbows in a boarding-house. In Madras houses are 

291 



Madras 

large, and stand in compounds that are all but parks. 
The town spreads itself out in these for miles and 
miles : you might call it a city of suburbs. You can 
drive out six miles one way to a garden-party, and 
three the other to dinner. Looking down on it from 
the top of the lighthouse on the High Court, Madras 
is more lost in green than the greenest city further 
north. Under your feet the red huddled roofs of the 
Black Town are only a speck. On one side is the 
bosom of the turquoise sea, the white line of surf, the 
leagues of broad, empty, yellow beach; on the other, 
the forest of European Madras, dense, round-polled 
green rolling away southward and inland till you can 
hardly see where it passes into the paler green of the 
fields. Down below, though the streams and the 
Black Town fester poisonously enough, you never 
seem to be in a crowd; there is room to see the 
people. Madras, further, is never very cold and never 
very hot, never very wet and never very dry. Space, 
green, white and scarlet and yellow blossoms on the 
trees, the night-breeze from the sea, the very mosqui- 
toes so strong on the wing — they give you the feeling 
that Madras, so far from dead, is consistently alive, 
and not merely tiding over from one season to an- 
other. 

Nor can the wandering eye detect signs of mental 
darkness. The railway that brings you into Madras 
has more comfortably arranged carriages and fills you 
with better and cheaper food than most, if not than 

292 



Madras 

any, In India. The railway that takes you out again, 
southward, gives by far the best travelling of any 
metre-gauge line I have tried. In Madras, it is true, 
you are conveyed away from the station in a sort of 
perforated prison van, but that happens in Calcutta 
too and Delhi. Your hotel is without honour in its 
own country, but in Bombay it would be even as the 
Ritz in Paris. The native enjoys cheap, rather rapid, 
and very crowded transport, such as he loves, in elec- 
tric tramcars. Wherever space needs to be econo- 
mised, the wire and its uprights are carried along the 
edge, not the middle, of the roadway, and the trolley- 
arm leans over to follow them. Also Madras enjoys 
a telephone service ; while as for shops — the leading 
tailor, who also sells lamps and tinned apricots, em- 
ploys his hundreds, and the leading chemist's might 
be mistaken for the town-hall. 

Then where is the darkness ? It is geographical. 
Madras has many virtues, but it has fallen into the 
fatal vice of being out of the way. Before the age 
of railways every considerable city in India was in the 
way, was its own centre. Madras had, to a great ex- 
tent, its independent government. But now, when 
rails have knit the country together, and the centre of 
it oscillates between Calcutta and Simla, Madras is 
left away in a corner. The Calcutta mail goes almost 
to Bombay before it turns north-eastward : either to 
the winter or to the summer capital it is nearly four 
days' journey. Madras swims strongly in its back- 

293 



Madras 

water, but in the main stream nobody cares. Other 
voices make what they call public opinion; other 
hands clutch the money that is to be spent j other 
armies fight the wars. The function of Madras is to 
pay. Its lands are all held direct from the Crown, 
there is no permanent settlement, and the assessment 
rises steadily. Madras raises the revenue, and the 
North spends it ; and the more loyally Madras pays, 
the less constrainedly the other provinces squander. 

Within the last weeks an event had happened which 
ought some day to change all that. The East Coast 
Railway had been opened for traffic between Madras 
and Calcutta direct. As yet the many rivers on the 
way are not permanently bridged ; the line is still in 
sections ; the trains are very slow and grossly unpunc- 
tual, even for the East. But when time has shaken 
it into shape this railway should bring Madras as near 
to Calcutta as Bombay or Lahore is. Then the whis- 
per of Madras may penetrate even to the throne, and 
the very Financial Member understand that a province 
would fain receive as well as give. Certain material 
benefits should follow, too. Coal will come down 
from Bengal or Hyderabad to replace the failing sup- 
plies of firewood. In time a line will be built from 
Madras to Paumben, opposite Adam's Bridge. Near 
there lies the island of Rameshwaram, which is the 
holiest place but two in all India. The others are 
Benares and Puri, Juggernaut's seat, near Cuttack. 
Between Puri and Rameshwaram the myriads of pil- 

294 



Madras 

grims will throng the East Coast Railway, to its own 
benefit and that of Madras. Later, it may be, the 
line will be carried right over Adam's Bridge into 
Ceylon. Then Madras would stand on a direct route 
from Europe by Colombo to Calcutta — a route that, 
since the P. and O. meets competition at Colombo 
and none at Bombay, should be somewhat cheaper, 
less plaguy, not appreciably longer, and, when it saves 
the change at Aden, decidedly more comfortable than 
the present way by Bombay. If that comes about 
Madras will have its chance of coupling up with the 
world again. 

Meanwhile there are advantages in being remote. 
Distant from seeds of war and sedition, Europeans 
and natives appear to live better together here than 
elsewhere. The native of the Madras Presidency is 
all new types. For the most part he is Tamil, small 
and intelligent in the northern part, robust and rowdy 
in the southern, long-haired, all but naked, speaking 
a language whereof Sundaraperumalkoil is a fairly rep- 
resentative mouthful. From the west, on the Malabar 
Coast, you hear tales of still stranger men and man- 
ners, — of Malayalis and Kanarese, Christians with 
Portuguese names — they were converted In blocks by 
the Viceroys of Goa, and each block took the name, 
Albuquerque or D'Souza, of its apostle — Arab-mixed 
Moplas, Syrians, black Jews and white Jews, two dis- 
tinct breeds, in Cochin. In this Presidency, too, and 
especially on the sequestered west coast, you can see 

295 



Madras 

what Brahmanism is like when wholly undiluted with 
Islam. There a Brahman is so holy that nobody ever 
sees him : he has his home and garden and temple all 
inside his own wall. He goes abroad, when he must, 
in a closed palanquin, and its bearers shoo every caste- 
less man off the road. If a low-caste man has got 
nearly to the end of a long narrow bridge and meets 
a Brahman's palanquin, he must turn back and with- 
draw into the fields out of pollution-shot. In this 
country the very measures of distance are fixed by the 
spiritual infecting-range of various lower castes : in- 
stead of speaking-distance or a stone's-throw they talk 
of the distance a man of such or such a caste must 
get out of the path when a Brahman comes along. 
More than that, only the eldest brother of a Brahman 
family marries ; the rest have the right by custom — 
which is law and religion added together and multiplied 
by a million — to range at large among the women of 
lower caste. Until lately custom ordained that the 
Brahman was not responsible for the maintenance of 
his children by such women — as a rule he never so 
much as sees them. The magistrate who first dared 
make a maintenance order in such a case was, to his 
honour, a Brahman himself. 

But all that, of course, is outside the city of Madras. 
In Madras itself the native is perhaps better educated 
than anywhere else in India, and — what by no means 
goes with education — is neither captiously discon- 
tented nor complaisantly submissive. The newspapers 

296 



Madras 

splutter a little occasionally, but you must remember 
it is not always easy to say quite the correct thing in 
a language not your own. For the rest, they appear 
to be by far the best- written of the native journals. 
Here again Madras has the advantage of its age. 
Whether education in Madras — notice that education 
always means higher education, not primary, which 
hardly exists — has not gone too far is another matter. 
I went one day to the Convocation of the University : 
when the Chancellor said, " Let the candidates step 
forward," the whole great ball rose and moved a pace 
to its front in battalions of B.L.'s and B.A.'s. Are 
they all wanted ? The supply of B.A.'s exceeds the 
demand even in England : what then of Madras ? 

But never mind that for now. The air of Madras 
does not agree with problems. It is enough to be in 
the India which you had divined and have found at 
last — to breathe its air and moisten your eye with its 
green. About Madras, too, you can notice what in 
chattering Bengal and the fighting Punjab you are apt 
to miss. There, alone on the field, picking at the 
earth with a single careless hand on his plough or 
standing, a lean, naked figure among the sleepy goats, 
you see the bed-rock of native India. The man who 
neither chatters nor fights, but does what the Brahman 
tells him, looks languidly to the land and the stock, 
and pays taxes. He is essential India. 



297 



XXXIII 

THE SALT-PANS 

The Assistant-Commissioner wore a khaki uniform, 
a braided jacket, and a crown on his shoulder-strap ; 
yet he did not look like a soldier. He looked over- 
worked and underfed. His eyes were pools in pits 
of socket ; the bones cropped out of his cheeks and 
chin. He looked like a man who was always travel- 
ling, eating sparely and irregularly of jungly food, 
often down with fever, oppressed by unrelenting 
anxiety. 

Being in the Salt Department, it is not wonderful 
if he was all this. Salt, as you know, is a Govern- 
ment monopoly in India : Government controls its 
production, prevents its illicit manufacture, and sells 
it to the consumers. For these functions it needs a 
considerable staff of Europeans; and the European 
of the Salt Department is the pariah of white 
India. 

Not that he is looked down on like a pariah ; as a 
rule he is simply not looked on at all. As a rule he 
is dumped down on a salt-marsh with no white man 
within a journey of days. His work makes him 
unpopular among the natives about him : naturally 

298 



The Salt-Pans 

they do not see why they should not scrape up the 
salt which God has evaporated and spread at their 
feet. His work is cruelly hard. At any minute of 
the night he has to get up to inspect the guards 
posted round the factory, or hurry for hours to sur- 
prise illicit manufacturers. Now he toils forward on 
horseback, now he flounders afoot through marshes 
and sliding sand-dunes, now crouches in a sluggish 
boat on a rank canal. When he falls ill — and of 
necessity he is often put down in festering fever-beds 
— he will likely enough have to shiver and sweat for 
a week in a canal-boat before he can so much as see 
a doctor. Month by month, blistered with sun, quiv- 
ering like a leaf with ague, no time to lie up, his 
English tongue going rusty, — and by way of compen- 
sation for his lonely labour he receives £i2S a-year 
when he begins, and after fifteen years or so will per- 
haps be enjoying £'^'^0. 

However, this particular Assistant-Commissioner 
was by way of being a lucky man. His district is 
only 6000 square miles, against some people's 12,000. 
When he is at home, which he is almost one month 
in three, he is only fourteen miles from Madras ; the 
trains of the new East Coast Railway are seldom 
over three hours late, so that you can generally 
reckon on doing the twenty-eight miles there and 
back in a day. Also there are two European in- 
spectors at his station, which is one of the largest 
salt-factories in the Presidency. 

299 _ 



The Salt-Pans 

You land on to a railway embankment of red sand, 
and look about for the buildings and the stacks of the 
factory. You will see nothing of the kind : it is less 
a factory than a salt-farm. But first begin at the 
beginning. You get into a punt and embark on 
what seems a great lake j it is really a backwater 
of the Bay of Bengal. Once upon a time this was a 
sanitarium for Madras. The shores of the backwater 
are densely planted with caserina, a fir imported from 
Australia, which will grow to firewood on dunes that 
will nourish nothing else. Out of the black-green 
depths of these plantations appear crumbling ruins of 
the half-classical end of last century. Here is the 
abandoned Government House ; beside it moulders the 
derelict club. Half-a-dozen villas are still owned by 
residents of Madras with a view to boating and fish- 
ing; but hardly a soul ever comes to boat or fish. 
For all this dates from the days before railways ; now 
people spend their hot weathers in the hills about 
Ootacamund. And now the old sanitarium — whether 
the caserina plantations blanket it from the sea-air, or 
the new railway bridge has unprisoned all the filth at 
the bed of the backwater — has developed into a fever- 
nursery instead. Nobody remains except the salt- 
officers : it is part of their business to have fever. 

At the lower end of the backwater the turquoise 
waves curl in snowy foam over the bar, and swish in 
through the breach in its middle. At the point — 
they tell you with a kind of grim pride — lies a salt- 

300 



The Salt-Pans 

inspector, who died alone of cholera on a Christmas 
Day. He was buried in a piece of canvas before his 
colleagues came back in the evening to hear that he 
was ill. 

The factory itself is on the opposite shore, and 
farther inland. When you land again and climb over 
the railway embankment, you see it stretched at your 
feet — a few little white shanties on the horizon, and 
nothing else. Nothing but a great flat of broken, 
dull-brown, muddy soil. When you get down on to 
it you see less still. Nothing grows except a red 
thing like a stone-crop and a few coarse grass tufts 
on banks and tumbling hillocks. Under wan, lustre- 
less clouds the ground looks barren of all goodness, 
numb and despairing. You slither along through 
slime, and presently find that the whole place is 
seamed with watercourses — broad channels like 
canals, with ditches and runnels taking out of them. 
The soil is marked into checkers by little banks. It 
is like richly irrigated land under a curse of utter 
sterility. Water all about you, earth under foot, yet 
everywhere this melancholy and haggard desolation. 

That is the farm — a farm watered with brine, 
whose crop is salt. With relief you come upon 
something doing — a few poles and bars, black like 
gibbets on the bleak horizon, with men about them. 
Nearer, you see that they are water-hoists. A 
cross-bar balances on an upright ; at one end hangs a 
palm-fibre bucket ; a man standing on the bar shifts 

301 



The Salt-Pans 

back and forward, and seesaws the bucket into the 
water and out again ; another on the ground empties 
it into a channel. This leads it to the flat checkers ; 
and here are a couple more naked men paddling in 
the shallow brine as for their lives. Stamp, stamp, 
stamp, up and down, back and forward, across and 
across, in a kind of combination between a treadmill 
and a palsied step-dance. They seem so gravely con- 
centrated on nothing that at first you think them mad, 
then learn that they are making the floor. They 
stamp and stamp and stamp it down hour by hour, 
day by day, till it is as hard as concrete. Then with 
floor and banks the pans are complete. 

They let the brine stand first in deeper, then in 
shallower, pans, and evaporate in the sun for about 
ten days — until the intensity of its saltness rises from 
three by the halometer, or whatever it is called, to 
twenty-five. Then the salt is precipitated at the 
bottom of the pans and raked off with broad wooden 
hoes like squeegees. The natives are as light-handed 
as they are heavy-footed ; they never break the floor 
which they made with their own soles. The salt 
drawn off" is dried in the sun on the ridges of the 
pans, then broken up, then put into sacks, then put 
into boats, and taken to Madras to be sold. And that 
is all about it. 

That is all — except crushing sun and blinding white 
glare and all-penetrating salt-dust for the salt-oflicer. 
In the hottest part of the hottest days other men get 

302 



The Salt-Pans 

under roofs : that is just the time that he must be out 
all day in the sun. The factory is a chessboard of 
twinkling brine and snow-white salt, more scorching 
to the eye than flame. While his eyes are being 
toasted before a quick fire, salt-drifts are banking up 
in them and in his ears and his nostrils and his mouth. 
He looks round, and, like Lot's wife, becomes a pillar 
of salt. With it all the few salt-ofEcers I have seen 
appear to grumble almost less than anybody in India. 
They say it is a healthy life — as long as you are well : 
when you begin to be unhealthy at all you are quickly 
very unhealthy indeed. Perhaps one reason for their 
comparative contentment is that they are justly proud 
of their department. For in salt, as in most things 
connected with revenue, Madras sets an example of 
efficiency and honesty to the whole of India. The 
salt revenue, you understand, is Imperial — goes, that 
is, to the treasury of all India, though it is collected 
by the provincial Governments. Now the salt-tax is 
very unpopular ; therefore a timid and dishonest pro- 
vincial Government will be lax in putting down illicit 
manufacture and pressing the sale of the licit product. 
Thus it keeps its subjects in good humour, and after 
all it is not the province that suffers, but India as 
a whole. The Bengal Government, for instance, has 
long winked at contraband salt-scraping all along its 
coast ; as the result, it sells its people only two-thirds 
or so of the salt they use, and defrauds the Govern- 
ment of India of ;^666,666, 13s. 4d. or so a-year. 

303 



The Salt-Pans 

In Madras, on the other hand, Government sells 
i6^ lb. of duty-paying salt per head of population per 
annum. It has been pronounced on good authority 
that man needs i6 lb. of salt in a year; so that the 
Madras Government can congratulate itself that its 
subjects do not deny themselves of an ounce of nec- 
essary salt, and that, at the same time, the State profits 
by every ounce consumed. Furthermore, this result 
appears to be attained without hardship to the natives. 
Of prosecutions initiated by the department in the last 
year, over ninety-nine per cent, have resulted in con- 
viction ; during the same time, charges have diminished 
by twenty-three per cent. Finally, there were only 
eight cases of assault on servants of the department. 
That, in a country where the only known expression 
of genuine public opinion is riot, goes to prove that 
the salt-tax, and the salt administration, and the salt- 
officer are not so unpopular as they are sometimes 
painted. 

Where the white salt-officer probably is unpopular 
is among his own native colleagues. A young man 
sends down a bottle of illicitly distilled spirits — he is 
excise officer for liquor purposes also — to his native 
superior. It is his first case, and he is pleased with 
himself — till he meets the native. " What was in 
that bottle you sent down ? " " Arrack, of course." 
" Ah, I thought so. When I got it there was nothing 
in it but sweet-oil. However, don't worry ; I've 
emptied it and filled it up with arrack and sealed it. 



The Salt-Pans 

ril swear It had arrack in it all the time, and we shall 
convict the fellow all right." 

It is rather hard for the young man to have to begin 
his official career by ruining a man who only meant to 
keep him out of trouble. Still, that is just what the 
young man is there for. There are fine openings for 
bribery and put-up cases in the salt and liquor depart- 
ment. Here, as elsewhere in jesting India, the native 
draws the British rate of pay and the Briton supple- 
ments the native's work as well as doing his own. 
He has to guard the guardians. 



305 



XXXIV 
THE GREAT PAGODAS 

Southward out of Madras you still run through 
the new India, the old India of the nursery. Now it 
is vivid with long grass, now tufted with cotton, then 
dark-green with stooping palm-heads or black with 
firs ; anon brown with fallow, blue with lakes and 
lagoons, black with cloud-shadowing pools starred 
with white water-lilies. Presently red hills break 
out of the woods, then sink again to sweeping 
pastures dotted only with water-hoists and naked 
herdsmen. 

Then in the placid landscape you are almost startled 
by the sight of monuments of religion. A tall quad- 
rangular pyramid, its courses lined with rude statues, 
a couple of half-shaped human figures, ten times hu- 
man size, a ring of colossal hobby-horses sitting on 
their haunches like a tea-party in Wonderland — they 
burst grotesquely out of meadow and thicket, stand- 
ing all alone with the soil and the trees. No worship- 
pers, no sign of human life near them, no hint of their 
origin or purpose — till you almost wonder whether 
they are artificial at all, and not petrified monsters 
from the beginning of the world. 

These are the outposts of the great pagodas of 

306 



The Great Pagodas 



o 



Southern India — those sublime monstrosities which 
scarce any European ever sees, which most have 
never heard of, but which afford perhaps the strongest 
testimony in all India at once to the vitality and the 
incomprehensibility of Hinduism. The religion that 
inspired such toilsome devotion must be one of the 
greatest forces in history ; yet the Western mind can 
detect neither any touch of art in the monuments 
themselves nor any strain of beauty in the creed. 
Both command your respect by their size : that which 
is so vast, so enduring, can hardly, you tell yourself, 
be contemptible. And still you can see nothing in 
the temples but misshapen piles of uncouthness, noth- 
ing in the religion but unearthly superstitions, half 
meaningless and half foul. 

The nearest approach to a symmetrical building is 
the great pagoda of Tanjore. Long before you near 
the gate you see its tall pyramidal tower, shooting 
free above crooked streets and slanting roofs. Pres- 
ently you see the lower similar towers, so far from the 
first that you would never call them part of the same 
building. In reality they are the outer and inner 
gateways — gopura is their proper name — built in 
diminishing courses, garnished with carving and stat- 
uary. From a distance the massive solemnity of their 
outlines, the stone lace of their decorations, strike you 
with an overwhelming assertion of rich majesty. But 
you are in India, and you wait for the inevitable in- 
congruity. 

307 



The Great Pagodas 

It comes at the very gate. The entrance is not 
under the stately gopura, but under a screen and 
scaffolding of lath and plaster daubed with yellow 
and green grotesqueness — men with lotus-eyes looking 
out of their temples, horses with heads like snakes, 
and kings as tall as elephants. There is to be a great 
festival in a day or two, explains the suave Brahman ; 
therefore the gopuras are boarded up with pictures 
beside which the tapestries of our pavement-artists 
are truth and beauty. You walk through scaffold- 
poles into a great square round the great tower, and 
with reverence they show you that colossal monolith, 
the great bull of Tanjore. I wish I could show you 
a picture of him, for words are unequal to him. In 
size he stands, or rather sits, thirty-eight hands two. 
His material is black granite, but it is kept so 
piously anointed with grease that he looks as if he 
were made of toffee. In attitude he suggests a roast 
hare, and he wears a half-smug, half-coquettish ex- 
pression, as if he hoped that nobody would kiss him. 

From this wonder you pass to the shrines of the 
chief gods. The unbeliever may not enter, but you 
stand at the door while a man goes along the dark- 
ness with a flambeau. The light falls on silk and 
tinsel, and by faith you can divine a seated image at 
the end. Next you are at the foot of the great tower, 
and the ridiculous has become the sublime again. 
Every storey is lined with serene-faced gods and 
goddesses, dwindling rank above rank, a ladder of 

308 



The Great Pagodas 

deities that seems to climb half-way up to heaven. 
Then the Brahman shows you a stone bull seated on 
the ground, like a younger brother of the great one. 
" It is in existence," he says, throwing out his words 
in groups, dispassionately, as though somebody else 
were speaking and it were nothing at all to do with 
him — " it is in existence — to show the dimensions — 
of four other bulls — which are in existence — up 
there." You lay your head back between your 
shoulder-blades, and up there, at the very top, among 
gods so small that you wonder whether they are 
gods or only panels or pillars, are four more little 
brothers of the hare-shaped toffee-textured monster 
below. 

Reduplication is the keynote of Hindu art. The 
same bulls everywhere, the same gods everywhere, 
and all round the cloistered outer wall scores on scores 
of granite, fat-dripping, flower-crowned emblems, so 
crudely shapeless that you forget their gross signifi- 
cance — but all absolutely alike. Next the Brahman 
leads you aside to piles and piles of what look like 
overgrown, gaudily painted children's toys. This is 
an exact facsimile of the Tower, reduced and imitated 
in wood. It is all in pieces, but at the festival the 
parts are fitted together and carried on a car. Every 
god sculptured on the pyramid is represented in a 
section of this model, waiting to be fitted into his 
place. Only what is richly mellow in tinted stone 
is garishly tawdry in king's yellow and red lead 

309 



The Great Pagodas 

— and again you tumble from the sublime to the 
infantile. 

Next, a little shrine that is a net of the most 
delicate carving — stone as light and fantastic as wood ; 
pillar and panel, moulding and cornice, lattice and 
imagery, all tapering gracefully till they become 
miniatures at the summit. It is a gem of exquisite 
taste and patient labour. And the very next minute 
you are again among flaming red and yellow dragon- 
tigers and duck-peacocks, and the one is just as holy 
and just as beautiful to its worshippers as the other. 
From which objects of veneration the Brahman passes 
lightly to the domestic life of the frescoed rajahs of 
Tanjore. " This gentleman — marry seventeen wives 
— all one day — doubtless in anxiety of getting son." 
It is quite true. The Rajah, having but three wives 
and no child, resolved to marry six more young ladies, 
and collected seventeen to choose them from. But 
the fathers and brothers of the rejected eleven were 
affronted; and rather than have any unpleasantness 
on his wedding-day, his Majesty tactfully married the 
whole seventeen, nine in the morning and eight in the 
afternoon. " And here," pursued the Brahman auto- 
matically, showing a tank, " he will let in water — 
and here he will play — with all his females — and all 
that." 

That is all, except to write your name in the 
visitor's book. As I went in to sign, I noticed a 
band of musicians standing at the door and thought 

310 



The* Great Pagodas 

no more of it. But as my pen touched the paper, 
suddenly reedy pipes and discordant fiddles and heady 
tom-toms began to play "God Save the Queen." 
A huge chaplet of muslin and tinsel, like a magnified 
Christmas-tree stocking, was cast about my neck; 
betel and attar-of-rose were brought up in silver 
vessels, and flowers and fruits on silver trays. The 
pagoda keeps its character to the end : the compliment 
was sublime — and I ridiculous. 

Yet the temple of Tanjore is the most simple and 
orderly of all its kind. Visit the great pagoda of 
Madura and you will come out mazed with Hinduism. 
All its mysteries and incongruities, its lofty meta- 
physics and its unabashed lewdness, seem to brood 
over the dark chambers and crannying passages. The 
place is enormous. Over the four chief gateways 
rise huge pyramid-towers, coloured like harlequins, red 
tigers jostling the multiplied arms and legs of blue 
and yellow gods and goddesses so thick that the 
gopuras seem built of them. In the pure sunlight you 
almost blush for their crudity, just as you would blush 
if the theatre roof were lifted off during a matinee. 
But inside the place is nearly all half-lighted, dim, and 
cryptic. You go through a labyrinth, that seems 
endless, of dark chambers and aisles. Now you are 
in thick blackness, now in twilight, now the sun falls 
on fretwork over pillared galleries and damp-smelling 
walls. But as the light falls on the pillar you start, 
for it is carved into the shape of an elephant-headed 



The Great Pagodas 

Ganesh, or a conventionally high-stepping Shiva. On 
you go, from maze to maze, till there is no more 
recollection of direction or guess at size : you are lost 
in an underground world of gods that are half devils j 
you hardly distinguish the silent-footed, gleaming- 
eyed attendants from the stone figures. Some of the 
fantastic images are smeared with red-lead to simulate 
blood : all drip with fat. A heavy smell of grease 
and stagnant tank-water loads your lungs. 

You feel that you are bewitched — lost and helpless 
among unclean things. When you come out into the 
sun and the cleaner dirt of the town, you draw long 
breaths. If you could understand the Hindu religion, 
you tell yourself, you would understand the Hindu 
mind. But that, being of the West, you never, never 
will. 



312 



XXXV 

THE RUPEE 

If you would learn about the Indian currency 
question do not go to India. I would not say that 
you will become the less able to understand it, but 
you will hardly become more so. If you stayed 
there for twenty years and kept a trained eye upon 
the question in all its bearings, your knowledge would 
probably be very valuable ; but if you wish to under- 
stand the question in the space of a month or two, 
your time would not be well spent in going to India : 
you had much better stay at home and read Blue- 
Books. For the Englishman in India, knowing 
something of India, is the first to admit that he knows 
nothing about its currency question. He will prob- 
ably be able to tell you a few of the inconveniences 
of having such a thing ; but beyond that the native 
himself is not more unintelligible. 

The rupee is a little thing, but it is at the bottom 
of the whole matter. The case is just this : if it 
were only the rupee and nothing more, all would be 
well — there would be no Indian currency question. 
Unfortunately the rupee is, or was until the Indian 
Government saw to it, also a bit of silver. At one 

313 



The Rupee 

and the same moment it was, and still is to some ex- 
tent, a piece of money and a piece of merchandise — 
indissolubly, inalienably both. Now that imperative 
dual function — perhaps we ought rather to say that 
function and that attribute — is more than the little 
rupee is able to bear. Could it succeed in shaking 
off one, all would be well. To rid the rupee of its 
incubus — that is the aim of all these years of strenu- 
ous wrangling. That must be the aim of any legis- 
lation which is to abolish the Indian currency ques- 
tion. Which must go, then — the function or the at- 
tribute ? The attribute, clearly. The rupee must 
continue to be money ; there is no great reason why 
silver, the article of merchandise, should be rupees. 
What is wanted is to make the rupee a rupee, and 
nothing more. If that cannot be done, the rupee 
must give place to something else. 

Let us try to be a little more explicit, less dog- 
matic. Money, economists tell us, is a medium of 
exchange and a measure of value. One of the req- 
uisites of an efficient measure of value is stability. 
A commodity which is worth so much this year and 
perhaps half as much again next may be a good 
speculation, but is certainly an extremely bad measure 
of value. It is not pleasant to find that to get quit 
of your bill you have to pay half as much again as 
you expected. Rather than run the risk of that 
people will do no business at all. But so it is, or 
much the same, with silver. Whether that is the 

3H 



The Rupee 

fault of silver or of gold need not bother us. The 
point has its value as providing an outlet for the 
dangerous controversial energies of metallists, both 
mono- and bi-, but has not much to do with the In- 
dian currency question. The fact remains that the 
value of silver as measured by gold is unstable. 

That brings us to another rub. The value of 
silver as measured by gold might be as unstable as it 
liked, for anything India need care, but for India's 
dealings with the rest of the world. At this moment 
not only does the Indian ryot, who is most of India, 
not know that there is any such thing as a currency 
question — he would not know it in any case — but he 
is really very little the better or the worse for the 
particular circumstances which have produced it. 
But India has a great foreign trade, and India has a 
great foreign debt, and India employs a great many 
foreigners to manage her affairs. Now most of 
India's foreign trade is with gold-standard countries — 
that is to say, countries which measure their values in 
gold. Most of the money she owes was borrowed in 
gold ; and her managers come from a gold-standard 
country, and want their pay in gold. It is her 
contact with the moving West that, monetarily speak- 
ing, worries India. 

The rupee, being what it is, has followed silver. 
When silver has become cheaper in terms of gold the 
rupee has become cheaper with it. Whether the 
value of the rupee has followed that of silver exactly, 



The Rupee 

or whether It has not, the argument is the same. 
Moreover, properly speaking, it is the exchange value 
of the rupee, rather than its value as a piece of silver, 
upon which the whole question hinges. Other 
factors than the gold price of silver contribute to the 
exchange value, at least since the closing of the 
mints ; but neither need they be considered at this 
point. Silver is the main factor anyhow, and for the 
last quarter-century silver has been almost constantly 
on the down grade. One may say that the decline 
began in 1873, when Germany, flushed with the 
French millions, discarded silver and took to gold. 
In self-defence the countries of the Latin Union, 
which, by keeping their mints open to both gold and 
silver at a fixed ratio, had done so much towards 
keeping silver at its then accepted gold level, were 
forced to desert it. Probably also a very much more 
powerful factor in the fall, and therefore in its results, 
was the enormous development of silver mining. 
The average world's output of silver during the 
five years 1871-75 was rather more than 631^ million 
ounces; by 1892 the year's output had increased to 
over 153 million ounces. At the same time the 
wealth of the world, as computed in money, in- 
creased very fast. Silver became inconvenient in 
itself as a basis of monetary systems. Moreover, 
every secession from the ranks of the silver-standard 
countries made the preservation of a silver standard 
more inconvenient, unprofitable, and dangerous to the 

316 



The Rupee 

residue. Desperate efforts were made to arrest the 
swift descent. International conferences were tried in 
vain. The unblushing and successful efforts of the 
silver men in the United States have cost that country 
millions upon millions of dollars. Yet all to no pur- 
pose. Silver, which stood at 5s. the ounce in 1872, 
had fallen below 3s. in 1893; ^^^ rupee exchange fell 
during the same period from 2S. to is. 2^d. Country 
after country was throwing silver overboard and tak- 
ing up gold in its place. 

The year 1893 ^^ °^^ ^° ^^ remembered in the 
monetary life of India. It is marked by the closing 
of the mints. Until 1893 anybody could bring as 
much silver as he liked to the Indian mints and re- 
ceive rupees in exchange. In 1893 ^^^^ ^ig^^ was 
abrogated by law. The position, as we have seen, 
was becoming serious. The rupee was down below 
IS. 3d.; there seemed every likelihood of its falling 
lower still. Worse than all, there was no possibility 
of forecasting with any certainty what the rupee might 
or might not do. If it was to fall, nobody knew how 
far or how quickly ; on the other hand, the fall might 
be varied by temporary recoveries. The fall which 
had already taken place had brought the Government 
to the verge of bankruptcy. The uncertainty was 
playing havoc with trade. True, a receding exchange 
had brought prosperity to some industries, but at the 
cost of the introduction of that speculative element 
which is highly deleterious to sound trading. Further- 



The Rupee 

more, the field for the disposal of silver was becoming 
so restricted that India ran the risk of becoming a 
dumping-ground for the world. But what chiefly 
made the position impossible was the impossible posi- 
tion of the Government — that was the main factor in 
the closing of the mints. 

In every year the Government of India has to re- 
mit a very large sum of money to England, partly to 
meet home charges, partly to meet the interest on the 
sterling debt of India. This is done by selling in 
London drafts payable in India, which are bought 
by persons who want to pay away money in India. 
These Government drafts are put up to tender. The 
higher the tender — that is to say, the higher the price 
in sterling which the Indian Government can get for 
each rupee which it undertakes to pay in India, the 
better it is for the Indian Government — the fewer will 
be the rupees that the Government will have to collect 
in India; or, if you like, the rupees which it has will 
go all the further. When the rupee exchange fell 
from 2s. in 1872 to is. 2^d. in 1893, ^^^^ meant that 
with each rupee of revenue the Government, instead 
of being able to discharge 2s. worth of obligation in 
England, was only able to discharge is. 2^d. worth. 
Imagine what that means when millions of pounds 
sterling are concerned. Sir James Mackay told the 
Indian Currency Committee in May of last year that 
had the rupee exchange stood at an average of is. be- 
tween the closing of the mints in 1893 ^^^ March of 

3^8 



The Rupee 

last year (as it easily might have done had the mints 
remained open), instead of where it did, the cost to 
the Government and the Indian taxpayer w^ould in all 
likelihood have reached another nine millions sterling. 

The decline and fall of the rupee has borne very 
hardly on those Englishmen in India who are paid a 
fixed number of rupees — civil servants, officers of the 
Indian army, and so forth. Not that the purchasing 
power of the rupee in India has varied a great deal ; 
it has not. But many of these men are obliged to 
send home a part of their income to their wives and 
children ; still more, put by what they can out of pay 
none too lavish as a nest-egg to fill out the pension 
when they get home again for good. Were salaries 
fixed on the basis of a low rate of exchange there 
would be no ground for complaint. But they are not ; 
nor indeed has it been possible to fix them so when 
exchange has been oscillating as it has. It is annoy- 
ing to find that while you have been sleeping a third 
of your savings has run away down the gutter of a 
falling exchange. Again, when a rupee was falling 
lower every year the value of rupee pensions, fixed at 
a higher rate and paid at a lower, fell with it. It is 
annoying to have to reduce your wine bill in your old 
age through no fault of your own. 

The railways are very much on the same footing 
with the Government — those, that is to say, which are 
built with English capital, which are most of them. 
They borrowed their capital in sterling, took it out to 

319 



The Rupee 

India in sterling, must pay interest on it in sterling. 
But the native pays for his ticket with rupees or frac- 
tions of rupees. The lower the rate of exchange the 
fewer are the pounds, shillings, and pence that the na- 
tive's rupees produce, and the less the railway com- 
pany has left over to provide dividends for the share- 
holders. Of course many of the railways enjoy some 
sort of Government guarantee : if the dividend which 
such a company itself is able to pay fall below a cer- 
tain point the Government makes itself responsible 
for the difference. That is very well for the company, 
but it makes the plight of the Government the more 
unpleasant. Moreover, it only makes the company's 
case a little better than it otherwise would be, for their 
British capital is wasting all the time. A sovereign 
brought out with the rupee at 2s. could only go back 
as 13s. 4d. with the rupee at is. 4d. 

On the other hand, there is a section of India's for- 
eign trade upon which the effect of a low and falling 
exchange is in a sense the very opposite. I refer to 
the exporters of Indian produce and manufactures — 
tea and indigo planters, cotton spinners and weavers, 
coal and gold miners, and the like. A good many of 
these people, usually companies, are like the railways 
in this respect, that they work with capital brought 
out from England : their interest must go over in 
sterling. They are also like the railways, in that the 
bulk of their working expenses is paid away in rupees. 
But, to their infinite advantage, they are unlike the 

320 



The Rupee 

railways, in that they are paid for their produce in the 
same currency in which they have to pay their in- 
terest. This does not apply to Indian exports to 
China, but it applies to her exports to Europe, Austra- 
lia, the United States, and Japan. The advantage is 
obvious. So far from having to scrape together in- 
creasing myriads of rupees for the purpose of discharg- 
ing their obligations, they are really for the moment 
much more comfortable when the rupee is falling than 
when it is even standing still. A sovereign's worth 
of tea, for instance, sent to England will bring back 
fifteen rupees with the exchange at is. 4d., but only 
ten with the exchange at the old rate of 2s. Now 
whereas, as we have seen, prices and wages in India 
itself change very slowly, if at all, a sixteen-penny 
rupee will make a sovereign go about half as far again 
as a 2s. rupee ; so that your planter has five rupees to 
play with, and can either pay a bigger dividend or re- 
duce his prices, besides having no need to worry about 
expenses. He has usually done a little of each. It 
is not surprising that the planter and spinner have 
steadfastly stood by the low rupee. Yet as recently 
as last June the chairman of one of the Indian tea 
companies was congratulating his shareholders on the 
steadiness of the rupee in the region of is. 4d., be- 
cause had it remained at is. 2^d. the stimulus to 
planting would have proved so violent that over-pro- 
duction and its consequent evils must certainly have 
resulted. 

321 



The Rupee 

One other effect of a shifting rupee remains to be 
considered — its effect upon the introduction of capital 
into India. India is a country of vast natural re- 
sources, materially speaking, but those natural re- 
sources are very far from being fully developed ; and 
nowadays vast resources can only be developed with 
the aid of vast capital. The accumulations of capital 
in the world are greater than ever before : never in 
the course of history has the available capital been 
more abundant ; never has capitalistic enterprise been 
more vigorous. Yet there are people who say that 
India is hanging back in the march of what we call 
progress for want of these things. The restrictions 
or safeguards — the term varies with the point of view 
— imposed by the Indian Government have had some- 
thing to do with it, though one of the earliest inci- 
dents of the new Viceroy's rule was their partial re- 
laxation. But something of the blame undoubtedly 
rests with the rupee. Who is going to send capital 
to India when, for aught he can tell, in the course of 
a few months it might automatically, without the 
slightest action on his part, begin to vanish ? That, 
as we have seen, is the effect of a falling rupee. 
True, during the past few years the rupee has firmed 
up, and bids fair, in the view of sanguine minds, to 
remain firm. But that is not good enough for your 
capitalist. He is as fearsome as a scalded cat. There- 
fore, ironically enough, this improved exchange, so 
far from bringing capital into the country, has had the 

322 



The Rupee 

opposite effect of taking it out. "We'll get our 
money back while we can," the capitalists have said 
among themselves. The exchange can hardly go 
much above is. 4d., thanks to the Government meas- 
ures of 1893, ^^^ ^^ might go down again as it has 
done before. Meanwhile India languishes for want 
of capital. 

In 1892, then, things looked black. Silver and the 
rupee had fallen far, and bade fair to fall further. A 
brand-new International Conference failed of a bi- 
metallic consummation. The Indian Government 
wrote home asking permission "to close the mints to 
the free coinage of silver, with a view to the intro- 
duction of a gold standard." In a word, the Indian 
Government was sick of drifting ; and small wonder. 
Silver was all very well in its way, there was much to 
be said for it; but the game was not good enough, 
single-handed or nearly so. If the Indian Govern- 
ment had its way silver would go overboard. Lord 
Herschell's Committee thought it might have its way, 
and overboard silver went. The splash was terrific. 
The metallists swarmed round the spot where it fell, 
and cannonaded each other soundly in bloodless con- 
troversy. But silver was gone under and could not 
be raised. The sound of their cannonading was loud 
and long ; but most of it was eminently premature : 
they hit each other for what they thought might re- 
sult from each other's policies. Five years afterwards, 
in 1898, the hubbub had hushed a little, and the In- 

323 



The Rupee 

dian Government, encouraged by the comparative 
stability of the rupee, and urged by the instability of 
commercial conditions, proceeded relentlessly with its 
design for the replacement of silver as the standard 
metal by gold ; whereupon the Home Government 
appointed a committee to look into the matter. 

The committee sat long and laboriously, and in the 
fulness of time the fruits of its labours appeared in 
the shape of three immense Blue-Books and an ex- 
tremely able and lucid report. The Secretary of State 
approved; the Indian Government is probably only 
anxious to do the same, despite the somewhat summary 
treatment which its own proposals received at the 
committee's hands. By the time, therefore, that this 
book reaches the world, the Indian currency question 
will probably be in a fair way towards settlement ; for 
the time being, let us add — for caution's and the silver 
men's sake. 

What, then, is the plan which is to lay this ghost 
which has walked so long ? In the first place, the 
committee declares for gold out and out. The British 
sovereign is to be a legal tender and a current coin in 
India. The Indian mints will take in all the gold 
that comes their way, giving sovereigns or rupees in 
exchange. At the same time, the rupee will continue 
to be an unlimited legal tender concurrently with the 
British sovereign, and it is to be worth is. 4d. If, as 
the committee desires, an effective gold standard be 
thus established, " not only will stability and exchange 

324 



The Rupee 

with the great commercial countries of the world tend 
to promote her existing trade, but also there is every 
reason to anticipate that, with the growth and confi- 
dence in a stable exchange, capital will be encouraged 
to flow freely into India for the further development 
of her great natural resources." May the committee 
see true ! 

H. S. 



325 



XXXVI 
THE ARMY AND MUTINY 

Our army in India is maintained as a defence 
against two dangers — invasion from without and re- 
bellion within. The double character is inevitable, 
but at the same time it is a source of military ineffi- 
ciency. It involves a radical contradiction. Two- 
thirds of our force in India consists of native troops. 
To guard against Russia our policy is to make these 
as highly efficient as troops can be made. To guard 
against mutiny our policy is to keep them inferior in 
efficiency to our own white troops. In dealing with 
the British troops Government is in a similar dilemma. 
To make them efficient against a disciplined enemy 
they should be trained together in large armies, wherein 
officers can learn to move and combine masses of 
troops of all arms. To make them an efficient police 
against internal disaffection — so it is argued — they 
should be spread as widely as possible over the coun- 
try, — should present everywhere to the natives the 
spectacle of white troops within easy striking distance 
of any point, and in command of all important stra- 
tegical positions. 

It is obvious that the consistent pursuit of one 

326 



The Army and Mutiny 

policy means a proportionate weakness in the other. 
If one danger is decidedly the more urgent of the 
two, then wisdom demands that the provision against 
the other should be frankly sacrificed. It seems to 
be the opinion of many good judges in India that the 
time has come to do this — to make our military 
policy truly military, and leave internal politics to 
politicians. 

The danger of another Mutiny, it may confidently 
be said, is vanishing every day. But even if it were 
not, the measures taken to guard against it are obso- 
lete. The great Mutiny owed its temporary success 
in the first place to the difficulty of moving up loyal 
troops over the enormous distances of Northern India. 
The railway only ran from Calcutta to Raniganj — 
120 miles out of the 900 to Meerut; the roads were 
bad and transport scarce. The mutiny at Meerut 
broke out on the lOth of May; Havelock could not 
march from Allahabad till the 7th of July. These 
difiiculties will never have to be encountered again. 
Now, by steamer and rail, troops could reach Meerut 
from Aldershot far sooner than then they could reach 
Meerut from Calcutta. That fact, known as well to 
natives as to Europeans, is a strong deterrent against 
rising; and it would furnish the strongest weapon 
against any rising that might occur. The force to 
defeat a new Mutiny would not be garrisons shut up 
in isolated towns, with small columns turning from 
the relief of one to that of another, but strong columns, 

327 



The Army and Mutiny 

transported rapidly by rail, and swiftly crushing each 
force of rebels as it began to gather head. The first 
requisite for such a mobile column would be good 
regimental training and tactical efficiency. 

Now an instance of what is being done to secure 
this. The first battalion of the Royal Warwickshire 
Regiment arrived in India last October. It had just 
made the campaign of Khartum. Fully maintaining 
the reputation of the old Sixth, it was acknowledged 
by all to be among the best of the uniformly fine regi- 
ments employed on that service. The men were of 
a good average of service, weeded by a summer in the 
Sudan, braced by war. Their drill, discipline, and 
shooting were consistently excellent. Such a regi- 
ment was fit for anything. When it arrived in India 
it first learned that it had been sent there by mistake 
or prematurely : it was not wanted anywhere. Finally, 
half of it was dumped down in Fort George, with no 
ground for manoeuvring or shooting within miles, and 
the other half at an obscure place called Bellary, three 
hundred miles away, to guard an old fort of Tippu 
Sultan. What devotion or ingenuity on earth can 
prevent that regiment from deterioration ? It is im- 
possible to keep even the separate wings at their pres- 
ent level of efficiency ; but even if it were not, how 
can a battalion keep itself fit to take the field when 
its two wings are stationed three hundred miles apart 
and never drill together ? How can even a proper 
regimental feeling be maintained when officers and 

328 



The Army and Mutiny 

men are forced to grow strangers ? What is to be- 
come of the men, plunged into a languid climate after 
severe exertions, conscious that their soldiering is no 
longer a thing in earnest ? What is to become of the 
senior officers, deprived of their chance of learning to 
handle a regiment. Or of the junior, first w^hetted by 
war and then compelled to find their chief interest In 
something other than their profession ? 

This is only a single incident in a deliberate policy. 
The 1st Seventh Fusiliers are divided between Nussir- 
abad and Neemuch, the ist Norfolk between no less 
than four stations on the Bombay side, the 2nd Royal 
Irish between Mhow and Indore, the 2nd K.O.S. 
B.'s between Cawnpore and Fatehgarh, the ist East 
Surrey between Jhansi and Nowgong, the 2nd Royal 
Sussex between Sialkot and Amritsar, the 2nd South 
Staffordshire between two stations in Burma, the ist 
Dorset between Nowshera and Attock, the 2nd South 
Lancashire between Jubbulpur and Saugor, the 2nd 
Welsh between Ahmednagar and Satara, the ist Black 
Watch between Sitapur and Benares, the 2nd Oxford- 
shire Light Infantry between Ferozepur and Mian 
Mir, the ist Essex between Shwebo and Bhamo, the 
Royal West Kent between Rangoon and the Andaman 
Islands, the ist Middlesex between four stations in 
Madras, the 2nd Connaught Rangers between Meerut 
and Delhi, the 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders 
between Bareilly and Shahjahanpur, and the 2nd Royal 
Munster Fusiliers between Dinapur and Lebong. 

329 



The Army and Mutiny 

Nineteen British regiments in all split up into pieces, 
and thus deprived of their best chance of efficiency ! 
It is incredible that the political situation demands 
this dispersal of units ; it is impossible that the mili- 
tary situation should not be weakened by it. 

Many of the native regiments are similarly sub- 
divided. But with them the principal drag is their 
armament. None of them have the Lee-Metford 
rifle, wherefore they were often called on in the late 
frontier war to face an enemy better armed than them- 
selves. In a Russian war they would have to do the 
same under much severer conditions. In such a war 
it is very probable that the Anglo-Indian army would 
be inferior in numbers -, should it be allowed to be 
also inferior in weapons ? 

I know that this is a subject of great difficulty and 
delicacy. It is an axiom with many people in India 
that the native troops should always be kept one stage 
behind the British. Only we should beware lest in 
making them safe to ourselves we issue in render- 
ing them equally safe to our enemies. That is surely 
the greater danger of the two. After the Mutiny 
care was taken to weaken any fresh tendencies to re- 
volt by instituting class company regiments, combin- 
ing men of different race and creed. A regiment 
thus divided, it was thought, would be less likely to 
combine against its officers. But of late this system 
has been abandoned, and the newer units are class 
regiments — all Sikhs or Pathans or Dogras, or what- 

330 



The Army and Mutiny 

ever it may be. This reversion to the old system, 
while presumably stimulating regimental keenness, 
may be taken to show that the Indian Government no 
longer feels any acute apprehension as to the loyalty 
of the native troops. Indeed it may be said confi- 
dently that such apprehensions are no longer justified 
in the very least degree : there is no doubt at all of 
the faithfulness of the native army. It may be true 
that a Mussulman can never quite surmount a feeling 
of antipathy — at any rate of strangeness — to a Chris- 
tian, or a native of India to a European. But it is 
also true that if the breach between races forbids in- 
timacy, it leaves room in the army for comradeship, 
and even nurtures the personal devotion of men to 
officers. It is not quite easy to see, therefore, why 
the native army is not armed with the very best weapon 
available. In any case, a beginning might be made 
with the Ghurkhas. They are foreigners in India, as 
we are. They have neither caste nor religion, and 
therefore associate far more easily with Europeans: 
the friendship between Johnny and Tommy has long 
been a commonplace of mess-room anecdote. In any 
rebellion it is as certain as anything can be that the 
Ghurkhas would be on our side though all India were 
against us. Why not give the Ghurkhas Lee-Met- 
fords ? And if the Ghurkhas, why not the Guides, 
the Sikhs, everybody ? The French trust Senegalese 
with repeating-rifles : cannot Britain do the like in 
India ? 



The Army and Mutiny- 
It is only natural that the tremendous experience of 
1857 should still be something of a nightmare to the 
Indian Government. " We are living on a volcano." 
" It has happened once ; it may again." You hear 
such phrases nearly every day. I have even heard it 
said that if all the ryots were ever to rise in a body, 
British rule would collapse utterly and in a day. Per- i 
sonally I should be inclined to back one battalion of 
British infantry, given time and ammunition, against 
all the ryots in India. But even if the ryots are far 
more formidable than they seem, they do not want to 
rise, and there is no reason to suppose that they ever 
will rise. A faction fight or a religious shindy now 
and again — certainly ; that is the ryot's Exeter Hall. 
But about his rulers he neither knows nor cares ; and 
if he did, he would never agree about them with the 
other ryots ; and if they all did know and agree, they 
would only conclude that they are very much better 
ofF under the existing Sirkar than they ever were, or 
are likely to be, under any other. Where the ryot is 
poor he is no poorer than he was. Where, as in 
some parts, his wife and children carry on their per- 
sons enough jewellery to keep them for five years, 
fearing neither raiding troopers by day nor dacoits by 
night — what should impel this man to risk his life and 
property in hope of a mere change of rulers ? 

Native India, relatively to our own force, is not 
militarily stronger than ever it was, and is perhaps 
even more divided. What disaffection exists is 



The Army and Mutiny 

mostly confined to the superficially educated, who 
have far less influence even with natives of their own 
race than an English professor of political economy 
has with our ploughmen. Among other races, being 
for the most part of weak and unwarlike stocks, they 
command only contempt. 

There is no danger of a second Mutiny in India, 
unless the British dominion should ever be seriously 
challenged. But if there should ever come a great 
and doubtful war in the north— what then? it 
Russia came against us on the frontier, it is certain 
she would also do her utmost to stir up risings behind 
us Even so, in our own provinces good officers, 
with police and volunteers, would probably keep their 
districts together. The critical point would be the 
rajah. Nearly all native princes to-day are irreproach- 
ably loyal; but you cannot guarantee a hereditary 
house against a disloyal son in the moment of supreme 
temptation. With this in mind, many men wag their 
heads doubtfully about the new institution of Imperial 
Service troops. There are over 20,000 of these— 
—armed, drilled, and equipped nearly as well as our 
own native regiments. Doubtless these forces, which 
owe no direct allegiance to the Empress, should not 
recklessly be created or increased. But nothing great 
can be done without taking risks. The object ot 
these forces is partly to increase the military strength 
of India, partly to give legitimate and congenial em- 
ployment to the rulers and gentlemen of the native 

333 



The Army and Mutiny 

states. If we fail in our dealings with these, the Im- 
perial Service troops are a weakness ; if we succeed, 
they are an accession of strength. 

If our aim were to avoid risks, we should not be in 
India at all. Being there, our boldest policy is also 
our safest. To weaken our native forces through 
distrust of their loyalty is only to invite the attack we 
fear. To be strong against attack is at the same time 
to ease the strain on loyalty. 



334 



XXXVII 
THE IMPERIAL BABU 

" But you English have the best of everything in 
India," said the Brahman ; " you can surely afford to 
be generous." 

" O, have we ? " says I. " Now what, for in- 
stance, have we the best of? Money, pleasure, 
leisure, satisfaction in work ? " 

He smiled the wonderful Indian smile, inscrutable 
and irresistible, winning and fawning at the same 
time. " You have," he said, " the consciousness of 
being the dominant race." 

That is exactly what we have; and that is all we 
have. It is a very fine and enviable thing to own. 
And yet even that is half-fallacious; for the real ruler 
of India is the babu. 

India is governed by natives of India. The last 
word, doubtless, is with us — with the Secretary of 
State and the Viceroy and Atkins in his grey flannel 
shirt. But then the last word in government is hardly 
ever said. The first word and the second and the 
third are those that make the difference to the subject. 
The minor, everyday machinery of rule is the 

335 



The Imperial Babu 

native's. Nearly all the lesser magistrates are natives, 
and a large proportion of the judges. In the execu- 
tive part of Government — revenue-assessment and 
collection, engineering and public works, the medical 
services, the forest department, the salt department — 
there are a handful of vv^hite men to order and a host 
of brown ones, half-supervised, to execute. At the 
centres of Government — the provincial capitals, and 
Calcutta or Simla itself — where you would expect to 
find British influence at its strongest, the babu clerks in 
the Government offices exert a veiled but paramount 
influence. And the very heads of everything — Lieu- 
tenant-Governors and sometimes very Viceroys — un- 
influenced by clerks, bow before the prattling philip- 
pics of the native press. Theoretically India is help- 
lessly dominated by Britons : actually native influence 
is all but supreme. 

You will call these assertions preposterous, and I 
shall not be able to call leading officials of the Indian 
Government to corroborate them. The cause of the 
British in India is not a popular one, either there or 
here ; yet there is hardly a Briton of experience in 
India, if I may judge by samples, who will not admit 
privately that these assertions are mainly true. To 
the stranger from England it is far the most striking 
and disquieting discovery that India has to offer. The 
cry of recent years has been for more Indian influence 
in India's Government; then you find Englishmen 
admitting the existence of abuses, incompetence. 



The Imperial Babu 

corruption in the services they are supposed to direct, 
lamenting them, breaking their hearts over them, but 
utterly powerless to purge them away. You find men 
giving orders which they all but know will not be ex- 
ecuted, because it is physically impossible to go them- 
selves and watch over their execution. Higher up 
you find men longing to get work done for India's 
benefit, but clogged and strangled by meshes of rou- 
tine, which exist solely to furnish salaries for more 
and more brothers and nephews of native clerks. 
You find a Lieutenant-Governor refusing to take 
measures against plague solely from fear of abuse in 
the native press. Then you realise that it is not more 
native influence that is wanted in India, but less — not 
fewer Britons in the services, but more. 

The white man's say becomes daily less, the black 
man's daily more. The reasons are not on the sur- 
face, but, when stated, they make things clear enough. 
The first, perhaps the most potent, is the new swift- 
ness of communication between England and India. 
You would expect that to increase English influence, 
but in India you soon grow inured to paradoxes. The 
nearer India comes to England the less will English- 
men have to do with it. When Warren Hastings 
went out in 1750, the voyage to Calcutta lasted from 
January till October. Hastings, once in India, had 
to make India his home, his career, his life. It was 
worth his while to study the ways of the natives and 
to write Persian verses. At this time there were none 

337 



The Imperial Babu 

of the conveniences — the ice, the railways, the hill- 
stations — which make life in India tolerable to white 
women ; most of the Company's servants lived with 
native mistresses and some married native wives. It 
was not edifying, but it made for comprehension of 
the East. Money was plentiful, Europe and retire- 
ment were far away ; the Company's servants spent 
their income in India and lived in style. Old natives 
will still tell you of residents and collectors who kept 
more elephants than now men keep polo-ponies. 
Above all, the white man in the Company's days was 
something apart and mysterious and worshipful in 
native eyes. No man knew whence he came or 
whither he went ; no man pretended to know his 
ways. He was a strange and superior being — all but 
a god. 

Now London is sixteen days from Calcutta. The 
modern civilian takes three months' leave every third 
year and a year's furlough every ten or so. He is 
married to a white wife, and his white children are at 
home ; he looks forward to reuniting his family when 
he gets his pension, and then — he will be but forty — 
to letters or politics — a new career. For this and his 
periodical flights homeward he saves his money, so 
that the native is less impressed by the white man's 
magnificence. The British merchant and barrister 
expect an even shorter period of exile — a competence 
in five or ten years, and then the beginning of their 
real work at home. Nowadays the great Indian mer- 

338 



The Imperial Babu 

chant lives in London; in Bombay and Calcutta arc 
only salaried partners and managing clerks; Parsis 
are far richer and more influential than these. In- 
stead of a man's life, India has become an apprentice- 
ship, a string of necessary, evil interludes between 
youth, leave, furlough, and maturity. You might 
imagine a burglar so regarding the intervals which the 
exigencies of his profession compel him to spend in 
Dartmoor. 

The consequences of the new order are inevitable 
and pernicious. The Anglo-Indian does not shirk his 
work ; to say so for a moment would be the grossest 
slander. No class of men in the world toil more 
heroically, more disinterestedly, more disdainfully of 
adverse conditions. But while his zeal does not flag, 
his knowledge fails to keep pace with it. Partly this 
is due to the dislocation of his work by frequent 
returns to England ; partly, and more, to the fatal 
tendency of the Indian departments towards red-tape 
and writing. The officer knows well enough that the 
more time he spends at his writing-table the less 
efficient he will be among the men he has to rule. 
He knows that if ever our rule were in danger, the 
man who kept his district together would be the man 
who knew his subordinates and whom his people 
knew; but he also knows that his future career 
depends far more on his reports than on his personal 
influence. Can you wonder that he devotes himself 
to what pays him best ? He would be more than 

339 



The Imperial Babu 

human if he did not. Being only human, he has to 
pay for his devotion to forms and minutes in loss 
elsewhere. The new generation of Anglo-Indians is 
deplorably ignorant of the native languages j after a 
dozen years' service the average civil servant can 
hardly talk to a cultivator or read a village register. 
Of the life, character, and habits of thought of the 
peasantry — always concealed by Orientals from those 
in authority over them — the knowledge grows more 
and more extinct year by year. Statistics accumu- 
late and knowledge decays. The longer we rule over 
India the less we know of it. 

Summarily, our knowledge of the natives grows less 
and less, as the natives' knowledge of us grows more 
and more. For while the very march of civilisation 
seems to conspire with fate against our comprehen- 
sion of the masses of the people, on the other side is 
the babu, each day more superficially fitted and more 
greedily willing to serve as middleman between the 
ruling race and the uneducated mass. In old days 
few natives knew English ; now there is a yearly 
swarm of graduates only too eager to make things 
easy for the European official. In Madras, where the 
native tongues are especially difficult and English 
education especially diffused, there is hardly an official 
who can talk freely with the uneducated : the babu 
interpreter is master of the situation. Other prov- 
inces are going the same way. It is so easy to ask 
your clerk, " What does he say ? " — and so easy for 

340 



The Imperial Babu 

the clerk to earn a couple of rupees by putting things 
before the Presence in the right way. 

The divinity that hedges a sahib is slowly breaking 
down. There are so many sahibs nowadays that they 
have ceased to be wonderful. And they are not all 
like the old sahibs : there are little sahibs, country- 
bred sahibs, hardly better than Eurasians, globe-trot- 
ting sahibs, whom a child can deceive, and who let 
you come into their presence with shod feet. And 
then remember the other side — that the babu has often 
been to England. The " Europe-returned," as they 
proudly call themselves, are usually of the inferior 
native races, and are of small account even among 
them. Yet they have been received in London or 
Oxford or Cambridge as equals — sometimes, on the 
strength of bold and undetected claims to social im- 
portance in India, almost as superiors. They have 
lost all respect for the European as a master, and ac- 
quired no affection for him as a friend. Every young 
Hindu who returns from England is a fresh stumbling- 
block to government in the interests of the Indian 
people. 

For the babu does not govern for the people, whom 
he despises from the height of his intelligence, and 
whom it is his inherited instinct to fleece, but for him- 
self, his relatives, and his class. To him mainly — 
helped by British pedantry — India owes the impene- 
trable buffer of files and dockets and returns which 
interposes itself between the white ruler and the brown 



The Imperial Babu 

millions of the ruled. The first impulse of the native 
who gets an appointment is to get some of the swarm 
of brothers and cousins who live in the same house 
with him to fatten under his shadow. He cares noth- 
ing for efficient work — why should he ? — but he cares 
very much for his family. Instead of making less 
work, he strives always to make more. He sits a 
lifetime in the office and knows its working as do 
few of his fleeting European superiors. Everything — 
in the public offices, the army, the railway offices, it 
is all the same — must be copied out in triplicate, in 
quadruplicate, in quintuplicate. If a new and ener- 
getic European attempts to cut away the hamper, 
" We cannot do this," he murmurs, " under rule 
12345, section 67890." The Briton sighs, but life, 
he thinks, is not long enough to try to move the limpet 
babu. But the babu, when he likes, can easily make 
out a case for the addition of sub-sections 67890 ^, ^, 

c % — and there is more work for his nephews. 

" Your accounts have come up quite correct," wrote 
the leading clerk at Calcutta to the leading clerk in a 
provincial government; " do not let this occur again." 
So the white man in the district sits at his desk 
writing papers which babus will docket and nobody 
will read; and, outside, his underlings oppress the 
poor. 



342 



XXXVIII 
THE LAND OF IRONIES 

India is amazing and stupefying at the first glance, 
and amazing and stupefying it remains to the last. 
The long panorama ends as it began with the dazed 
murmur, "A new world." 

The habit of travel extinguishes wonder, and begets 
a tranquil if curious acceptance of new surroundings. 
The professional traveller takes it as part of his daily 
life that he should wake up among habits, climate, 
growths, languages, and people which he never saw 
before. He knew they existed, and they are not much 
different from what he had pictured them. 

But India disquiets the most sodden traveller. That 
it is vast and complex is nothing ; but with its vast- 
ness and complexity it yet remains utterly alien to 
everything else. You have no foothold whence to 
advance upon a closer comprehension. Shut by its 
mountains into a corner of the earth, it has ever pur- 
sued its own mysterious ends ; the breeds of men who 
broke through the passes it absorbed and quietly assim- 
ilated to itself. Stranger breeds of men have come 
over the sea; India has taken no heed of them. India 
is India, and ignores the world. 

343 



The Land of Ironies 

Other countries have a measure of consistency : 
they are either wholly civilised or wholly barbarous, 
affect splendour or accept squalor. India sees stateli- 
ness in the filthiest faded silk so it be shot with pearls ; 
and a trained mechanician burns a man alive to pro- 
pitiate a defective steam-engine. Other countries hold 
a degree of privacy essential to self-respect ; India has 
deliberately, by caste-brotherhood, cut privacy out of 
its existence. Other countries aim at doing ; India's 
idol is inaction. Islam influenced other lands of the 
East ; India influenced Islam. The learning and the 
letters of the West were sluiced into India in one 
sudden stream ; after a moment's astonishment India 
accepted them, and studied them with prodigious facil- 
ity, but without a spark of interest or an effort to- 
wards appreciation. To the West, the ordinary na- 
tive of India is almost inhuman. The West can 
admire the strength of his affections within his family, 
and detest his cold-blooded malignity outside it; but 
for the rest he appears now unearthly wise, now child- 
ishly inane. The grave Brahman will unreel you 
systems of metaphysics compared with which the 
" Criticism of Pure Reason " is simple and concrete ; 
then he will depart and make his offering to a three- 
headed goddess smeared with grease and red paint. 
The very ryot seems an incarnation of the spirit of 
husbandry, a part of nature, a primeval Pan — and he 
will carelessly beggar his family for three generations 
because it is the custom to waste money on funeral 

344 



The Land of Ironies 

feasts. Two students attend a college : one becomes 
senior wrangler, and the other is hanged for assassi- 
nating a policeman. 

Into this maze of contradictions, to rule this blend 
of good and evil, steps Britain. And not content 
with ruling him — which is easy, for he accepts any 
master that comes — we have set ourselves to raise 
him, as we put it. Which means to uncreate him, to 
disestablish what has grown together from the birth of 
time, and to create him anew in the image of men 
whom he considers mad. This is surely the most 
audacious, the most heroic, the most lunatic enterprise 
to which a nation ever set its hand. 

How, now, have we succeeded ? Let it be said 
first that we have deserved success. If any enter- 
prise in the world's history has deserved success, it is 
the British empire in India. Our connection with 
the country began as most legitimate and mutually 
beneficent commerce. It developed into conquest — 
not through any lust of dominion, but almost acci- 
dentally, and certainly against our will; it was the 
inevitable consequence of the weakness and dissen- 
sions of the Indian races themselves. Having ac- 
quired the empire, we have administered it with a 
single-minded devotion to the interests of its own 
people which has never had a parallel. We make 
India pay its own way, but beyond that Britain gets 
not a penny from it for any public purpose. We 
have imposed duties against our own products ; in a 

345 



The Land of Ironies 

hundred ways we refuse to facilitate the business of 
our own countrymen. 

It is sometimes said that India offers desirable SJ 
careers for our superfluous youth. This may be true 
spiritually. A nation like ours does well to offer ad- 
ventures to its sons. Yet even spiritually we get 
nothing indispensable from India : the empire has 
half-a-dozen spheres where hardships and dangers can 
be had on terms as favourable as any that India offers. 
Materially, it is enough to say that every officer in 
our service, except less than a thousand civil servants, 
is heavily underpaid. If any nation ever deserved the 
reward of good work done for its own sake, it is 
Britain in India. 

And on this comes in the hideous, if most inevi- 
table, irony that the reward of our work is largely fail- 
ure, and the thanks for our unselfishness mainly un- 
popularity. You might almost imagine there was a 
curse on British India, which ever turns good en- 
deavours into bad results. The great gifts which we 
are supposed to have given India are justice and in- 
ternal peace — and each has turned to her distress. 
The one is driving her peasantry off the land, the 
other is preventing an effete race from the renovation 
brought in by alien conquerors. 

When we say we have given justice, we only mean 
that we have offered it — tried to force it upon peoples 
which dislike and refuse it. What we have really 
given is a handful of incorruptible judges, whose ex- 



The Land of Ironies 

perlence enables them to strike a rough balance be- 
tween scales piled up with perjury on either side. 
Often and often a litigant comes to the European 
judge and says, "You were wrong to give that case 
against me. Sahib. The other side were all lying, and 
we — well, of course, we lied too; but the truth was 
such and such, and we were right. But of course 
you could not tell which was lying most, and we 
knew you did your best to decide rightly, only you 
were wrong.'* The litigant believes absolutely in 
the honesty of the sahib, and accepts it as part of his 
inexplicable idiosyncrasy ; he does not seek to emu- 
late it. As for the great mass of native judges, sub- 
ordinate and supreme, who do the greater part of the 
ordinary business of justice, some are incorruptible : 
there were incorruptibles in India before we came. 
But the mass of them, as of the other native officials, 
are just as they ever were, and, with the whole coun- 
try leagued to screen them, it is impossible that they 
shall be otherwise. 

The difference under our rule is not so much that 
justice is done as that the law is enforced. The rich 
man benefits under this, for a Rajah's government 
would seldom let a rich man get out of a lawsuit with 
a full pocket ; but the poor man suffers in the same 
proportion. In the old days the poor debtor was pro- 
tected by the rapacity of judges and Government. 
The usurer dared not go before the Rajah for leave to 
attach the peasant's stock and crops and land. "Aha," 

347 



The Land of Ironies 

his Majesty would say, " you must have been making 
money, my friend. We must look into this." But 
in a British court the sacred contract must be upheld, 
and the ryot is ruined. 

The irony of peace is as bitter. Peace is sometimes 
a blessing, no doubt ; but then so sometimes is war. 
War was the salt that kept India from decay. It 
caused horrible suffering, presumably, though in India 
not perhaps much more than peace ; at least it con- 
spired with famine and pestilence to keep the popula- 
tion down. All three have been greatly mitigated 
under our rule, and now a prodigiously increasing 
multitude is a dead weight on the general prosperity 
of native India and a night-mare to her foreseeing 
statesmen. But that is not the only, nor the direst, 
curse of peace. India is effete. It strikes you as 
very, very old — burned out, sapless, tired. Its peo- 
ples, for the most part, are small, languid, effeminate. 
Its policies, arts, industries, social systems stagnate, 
and the artificial shackles of caste bind down their 
native feebleness to a completer sterility. Now the 
old wars periodically refreshed this effeteness with 
strains of more vigorous blood. Most of the greatest 
names of Indian history, the wisest policies, the 
bravest armies, the noblest art, belong to races of new- 
comers. It seems that the soil and climate of India 
need but three or four generations to sap the vitality 
of the most powerful breed. 

Now that Britain keeps the peace in the plains and 

348 



The Land of Ironies 

guards the passes of the hills, there will come in no 
invaders to renew the energies of the weakened 
stocks. With each generation of firm and just rule 
the ill effects will percolate deeper and deeper. Fail- 
ing some new process of quickening, the weary 
races of India must inevitably dwine and die of sheer 
good government. 

Whence is the new life to come ? From us ? The 
gulf between Briton and native yawns no less deep 
to-day—perhaps deeper — than when the first English- 
men set up their factory. at Surat. Our very virtues 
have increased the gap that was in any case inevitable 
between temperaments so opposite as Britain's and 
India's. Justice India can do without ; for peace she 
does not thank us. This, too, will grow worse and 
worse with time, instead of better. The men who 
knew the sufferings of intestine war are long since 
dead ; their grandsons, not knowing wherefrom we 
have delivered them, are naturally not grateful for 
deliverance. Even the best educated natives are very 
ignorant of Indian history ; they simply do not know 
from what we have saved them. Even if they did, 
things would be little better ; for, although it is a silly 
fiction that no native of India can be grateful, po- 
litical and national gratitude is a watery feeling at the 
best. 

What else have we to count on for the regener- 
ation of India ? Christianity ? It has made few 
converts and little enough improvement in the few; 

349 



The Land of Ironies 

is it not too exotic a religion to thrive in Indian soil ? 
Actual fusion of blood has done as little. It is usual 
to sneer at the Eurasian as combining the vices of 
both parents, but this appears to be a slander. In 
the days vi^hen generals married begums Eurasians 
counted many men of ability and character ; that you 
hear of few now is more likely due to the fact that 
the modern breed is almost necessarily of a low type 
on both sides. As it is, Eurasians fill a place most 
creditably which nobody else could fill. Industrially, 
as overseers, foremen, railway-guards, and the like, 
they are an almost indispensable link between white 
and native. But to expect them to form a link in 
any deeper sense, even though a Viceroy expresses 
the hope, is over-sanguine. It may be unjust, but 
there remains a prejudice against them among white 
and native alike. 

And after all, what link could bind together such 
opposites ? Language and education and assimilation 
of manners are powerless to bridge so radical a con- 
tradiction. What close intercourse can you hope for, 
when you may not even speak of your native friend's 
wife ? Native men are antipathetic to European 
women ; native women must not be so much as seen 
by European men. A clever and agreeable Brahman 
told me that he would not let even his own brother 
see his wife. I do know one white man who did 
once see his native friend's wife. " This is my 
study," said he ; " that " — as a swathed figure shuf- 

350 



The Land of Ironies 

fled silently and rapidly across the room from door to 
door — " is my wife ; that is the presentation clock 
from my pupils at the college." And he was an ex- 
ceptionally broad-minded man. Those who know 
and like the natives best tell you that you can never 
speak with the best-known and best-liked of them 
for any time without a constraint on both sides which 
forbids intimacy. " Of all Orientals," says the one 
Englishman who has come nearest to knowing them,^ 
" the most antipathetical companion to an English- 
man is, I believe, an East Indian. . . . Even 
the experiment of associating with them is almost too 
hard to bear. ... I am convinced that the na- 
tives of India cannot respect a European who mixes 
with them familiarly." Nature seems to have raised 
an unscalable barrier between West and East. It has 
lattices for mutual liking, for mutual respect ; but 
true community of mind it shuts ofF inexorably. 

Every loophole of optimism seems closed — except 
one. When all is said and done, we have only been 
in India a little over a hundred years — in many parts 
of it hardly fifty. To immemorial India that is like 
half an hour ; and when we first went to India we 
were, after all, not very much less corrupt — whether 
there or at home — than India is to-day. To move 
the East is a matter of centuries ; and yet it moves. 
Often it seems that to mean the right thing only 
ends in doing the wrong one. We have made, and 
^ Sir Richard Burton. 



The Land of Ironies 

are making, abundant mistakes : in administration and 
education we seem to be running further and further 
off the right lines. But in the East it is especially 
fatal to say " Too late " too soon. We have done 
much good material work ; everywhere we have made 
two blades of grass grow where there was but one. 
We have been honest and we have done our best. 
Whatever we have done or left undone, we have im- 
ported into public affairs a new morality. It may 
not yet have been widely imitated, but that is rather 
a reason for hope than despair. No morality worth 
having was ever adopted from the Sinai of a con- 
queror. What there is in native India of public 
spirit, of unswerving public integrity, of unsparing 
devotion to public duty, we may set down to our 
credit ; and we may say that if it grows slowly it is 
the likelier to live long. It is far too early to despair 
of India yet. It is not only the land of ironies, it is 
also the land of patience. 



352 



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